Emrys Davies wrote:
"Terry Farrell" wrote in message
...
In which case it is already corrupt reinforcing the advice never to
work directly with a floppy disk (or any other removable media
either).
When you say "or any other removable media either" are you including a
USB Flashdrive, as I used one of them to back-up my .dbx files. I
made a folder on the Flash Drive and copied my Identity into it from
Windows Folders. Or does your observation just relate to Word, only?
Thanks,
Emrys Davies.
The advice is specific for Word (although there may be some other programs
that behave similarly) and mostly for floppies (but with some caveats for
other removable media).
The big problem with Word and floppy disks comes from the way Word uses
temporary files (
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=211632). There are a
number of temp files, some of them as large as the document itself, that
Word must keep in the same folder as the original document. With the limited
capacity of floppy disks, the total size of the document and its temp files
can easily exceed that capacity. If that happens, Word behaves badly, and
irretrievably corrupted documents are the result.
On a USB drive or other gigabyte-or-larger removable media, this specific
kind of problem is unlikely (although theoretically still possible, as it
would also be on a nearly full hard drive). The danger here is that you may
forget that you have a document open -- maybe in a minimized window -- and
remove the drive. That, too, can result in a corrupted document.
--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ:
http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.