Hi ?B?cmV2cm9udmVnYXM=?=,

largely because I have been one of those who worked off
floppies before and CD/RWs now. I have been afraid of hard drive crashes and
the loss of much, much important data.

Always a bad idea, when working with Word. This is because Word is creating,
writing to and reading from multiple "scratch" files when you edit a document.
And this doesn't always work too well when everything is going to/from
"removable media". You were actually courting exactly the problem you wanted to
avoid :-)

When Word is involved, the better approach is to work with the document on the
hard-drive, then save to your backup medium via Windows Explorer, once the file
has been closed.

So I started operating from the hard drive at the suggestion of one of my
friends

I'm so glad you listed to him/her :-)!

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or reply
in the newsgroup and not by e-mail :-)