Auto Save? Please?

[dwag]

A moment ago, after I'd spent a tedious couple of hours getting the text and images of a topic just right, the infamous "MadCap-has-encountered-a-problem" window popped up and forced me to kill the work. To my despair, I'd forgotten to save the work along the way.

Such little disasters have occurred maybe three times since our purchase of the MadCap license five months ago.

Tell me again: MadCap doesn't have an auto-save or recovery feature?

All right, I'm going to count to ten and call it a day.

Thanks.

[SteveS]

...and when you come in tomorrow, lodge a bug report here.

Its a mongrel when that happens. Still, it could be worse - you could be authoring in Word. That does have auto-save, but it crashes so often its not funny (I know, I'm doing some work in Word at the moment)

[dwag]

Thanks for the response. The link to lodging the bug didn't work (IE can't display page). When you can, please repost the link. Thanks, again.

[LTinker68]

The correct URL is http://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx. It's also on their website's support page, although it's labeled "Submit a feature request".

[dwag]

Thanks for the help and the heads up.

[dwag]

It just happened again, and I lost a bunch of work. Now I'm officially worried. I lodged a bug report yesterday and am compelled to do so again today. This project is big, and no small amount is on the line.

[KevinDAmery]

How often does it crash on you--sounds like it's fairly common if I'm reading correctly. In my experience that isn't normal (I can probably count on one hand the number of times Flare has generated the message you're talking about).

You might want to look into reinstalling .NET 2.0 and making sure it's up to date. Regular crashing is not something that should be happening.

[dwag]

Since our purchase of the license in January of this year, it's crashed on me five times, twice in the last two days. Given that I work on it nearly every day, it's a small percentage. But two in the last two days has me concerned. One of our developers suggested that, until the issue is resolved, I keep the number of open programs to a minimum. I've had only two programs open since the last crash this morning, and all has been well. So perhaps we've stumbled upon a "workaround."

Thanks for the suggestion, by the way.

[KevinDAmery]

The only other suggestion I can think of unless / until Madcap adds an autosave is the old college mantra: "save early, save often, make backups."

[Fedja]

Far be it from me to advertise smoking, but it's what makes me leave my chair often, and since the good ole days of Windows98, I've embraced the habit of saving my work before I got up. My advice, get used to saving your work whenever you do a common and repetitive task. Flare aside, there's loads of other software out there that doesn't autosave, and I always pat myself on the back when one of em crashes on me.

[RamonS]

That is a good recommendation, but users like you don't excuse MadCap and others to implement an autosave function. Since applications today still crash as often and as violently as they did back in the DOS days (ya know, only a difference of 20 years of development) autosaving and recovering from a crash state is a must. Gee, even OpenOffice.org can do that!

[Darci]

Save - save - save. If you are a Word user, you know that even with the autosave set at the absolute most frequent, you can still lose files and hours of work. I had a problem with one of my old computers that cost me hours and days of lost work. Auto save was useless with the problems I was having.

I save frequently and back up daily.

My only time having frequent crashes and Flare issues was with a previous laptop that turned out was causing the problems; the software wasn' t at fault. We thought it was a .NET issue and reinstalled multiple times, but in my case, ultimately the solution was to replace my computer...

If you are still continuing to experience these issues, I would suggest asking to 'borrow' another computer and try working for a while and see if you still encounter these same issues. If not, your company would be wise to just permanently swap out your computer.

That's what we did. My stress level dropped and my productivity increased dramatically.

[RamonS]

True, in Word it is save, save, and save - up to the point when Word constantly crashes on a save and hoses the entire document. Besides saving, copy and paste the text at least into a text file in Notepad and save that. Notepad is usually fairly reliable.