How does backup in MS Word work?

[packman 0]

Anyone know the details of how MS Word makes backups of Word files, under WinXP? Something's gone wrong with my MS Word.

 

It's MS Office 2000 and, over the years, I've had precious few problems with the MS Word component. It's got all the service packs and other fixes applied. Suddenly, today, as I opened MS Word (after having just booted my machine), it came up with an error message, saying that a part of Word had become corrupted as it was opening and it asked if it should attempt a recovery. Foolishly, I declined the offer and just shut down Word at that point.

 

As a consequence of this, I lost one or two important document files. Fortunately, I'd previously put copies elsewhere on my PC and was able to copy those back into Word. As far as I can tell so far, Word seems to be working okay still but I'm noticing that it appears to no longer make a backup version of each new file in My Documents. It successfully saves the new files but simply doesn't also save a backup version.

 

Hitherto, I've not really bothered that much about Word making these backups. They get allotted, automatically, the extension wbk. Can someone with some knowledge in that area tell me how and when Word makes these wbk backups?

 

In Word, I've got the Save options in the Save tab of Tools/Options correctly set up, namely "Always create backup copy" and "Allow background saves".

 

I was wondering whether Word perhaps creates each backup only 24 hrs later or something. I've certainly run some quick tests, to see if it makes a backup file simply on a new opening of Word, or after a reboot, regardless of date, but no joy.

 

Note that this is Word as in Office 2000. There's a Detect & Repair function available in Word but when I've started to run that, it wants to copy SR1 files off the original Office installation CD. Well, that would probably make matters worse, as the SR1 on that CD was superseded at a later date by sr1a and SP3, which were updates to Office 2000 and which I downloaded and installed.

 

It might be that something relatively simple in Word has got reset and a repair, as such, isn't needed. There's no description available in Office 2000 of how the backup files are generated, because backing these up only became a feature under WinXP, which of course came along several years later.

 

Can anyone advise me on this?

[peterh 1]

1. Make sure 'Fast Save is turned off' (although this is mutual exclusive with backup files option)

2. A backup copy is only made when you modify a file and it will save it in the same location as the original document e.g

Backup of file.wbk (it basically copies the existing file, and saves the new changes in the doc file)

 

Try turning off the backup option, click apply, and ok. Then open tools, options, turn on the backup option, click apply and ok.

[packman 0]

Peter,

 

Many thanks for your response. The second point you made was the key to the mystery! Like you say, a backup copy is made only when you re-open a file. I've just run another test to check for that.

 

As for Fast Save, I already had that turned off.

 

So, hey, that's something else I've learnt. Hope I'll remember that, in the future.

 

Am now not sure what to do about the original glitch in MS Word. Attempting a Repair of it is likely to introduce more problems than it'll solve, owing to various service packs and bugfixes having been applied to Office over the years. I'm not sure if I've recovered all lost doc files. I've certainly recovered the last main file I was working on but, of course, with several dozens of files saved in Word when Word decided to malfunction, I can't know which others might have been lost. I do partition backups to an external drive from time to time, but not every day, and therefore restoring from there wouldn't help.

 

Anyway, thanks again for your help. Much appreciated.