To AutoRecovery, With Love

By Julia Cox, Writing Consultant

On August 21, 2009, tragedy struck.  My MacBook crashed, exactly 11 hours before I was to begin a fresh term of graduate classes.

The next day, I stood petrified in the Apple Store, ready to pen a “dear Steve” letter (to late Apple founder Steve Jobs) bemoaning that my overpriced, allegedly immortal MacBook had come undone, my personal history interrupted, my Alexandria burned.

Indeed, the digital age has conjured new forms of personal crisis, where a frayed motherboard wire can extinguish vacation memories, silence a music collection, and destroy a canon of professional and academic documents in the space of a few seconds.

For students, technological catastrophe can be especially traumatizing, as it always strikes with an impending deadline. Microsoft users will recognize the blue screen of death. For Mac patrons like me, disaster starts with the rainbow wheel of pain. Regardless of which team you click for, the feeling of loss, pain, and nausea is the same.

Thankfully, a crash doesn’t automatically signal a paper lost. Here are some emergency recovery tips, to be followed in this order.

1. Pray to the AutoRecovery gods. Restart and reload Microsoft Word. There is a possibility Word has saved the file for you through its AutoRecovery feature (available on every version since 2003). If so, the Document Recovery task plane will pop up on the left side when you restart. Select your file from the list and immediately click “Save As.”  Technological karma is real, and you may not be blessed twice.
2. Call in a search party.  Open MyComputer (Spotlight on a Mac) and search for .asd file types. This will allow you to manually look through all the AutoRecovery files on your computer. If you’re still left in the lurch, repeat the process for .wbk and .tmp files, which could also lead to automatically backed-up versions of your documents. If the search yields many files to sift through, sort by date to look at the most recent.
3. Check the trash. Sometimes, older versions of the aforementioned file types are auto sorted into the trash. Doesn’t hurt to check.
4. Get creative. Did you email an earlier draft to an instructor? To yourself for print-out? Think of an external or cloud source that may also have a version of the file. Working from an older version is infinitely better than starting from the ground up.
5. Begin cave man recovery. This is a last resort, but if you have to recover from your brain, I’d recommend starting with an outline. Think of your paper in big pieces first, and don’t worry about recreating individual sentences exactly as they were.

Some may take solace in crash prevention. Free services like Google Docs and Dropbox store your files online so you can access them anywhere. Regardless of which emergency step or prevention method you invoke, remember that computer crashes are a moment in your academic coming of age. Or at least a humorous anecdote you can blog about later.

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