It only seems to crop up at this time of year. Reporting! It’s as well that our format does it as you go! Save! But do you make a backup, somewhere else? The hard drive in the staffroom is there for that very purpose. A teacher had almost finished 29 reports and her computer which had been playing up, previously, though she had not notified, and continued to use, despite its erratic behaviour, crashed and gave up the ghost, big time. (A white screen with blue strips.) It would not shut down or, after the removal and replacement of the battery, start up independently. Because of the screen it was impossible to tell if it had started up from a system disk. It did start up holding down T, while linked to another with a firewire cable, so her work folder and her reports were retrieved, but the reports were corrupt, presumably because she was working on them at the time of the crash. I copied them to a couple of other machines and got the same message and was instructed to use ‘recover’, but that was not an option. So I dashed down to Springbank Distillery and borrowed their copy of File Salvage, but that didn’t work. It recovered the damaged file.
Then the ‘Eureka’ moment. What if there were other options on the Filemaker menus in the full version of Filemaker? Open it from within Filemaker, put in on my old Masterclass machine? And lo there were! The magic word ‘Recover’. Result! One thankful teacher who had spent over 25 hours, working, but did not value her work enough to back it up, till it was apparently lost! And all would have been totally lost if the format created in Filemaker had not been saving for her already. I explained to her, it was not me she should be thanking, but the person who introduced me to Filemaker. I should have thought of trying that first!
So reports…Backup… backup ..backup and don’t dare moan if you don’t, and something goes wrong! Set your programmes to save every five minutes and save some grief. This teacher was lucky that the format she was working on did it for her.
Hey, we’ve all been there!
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