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I'm not talking about unsaved data, but I actually managed to wipe out 2 1/2 hours' work in a column I had just finished putting the finishing touches on and proofing. What happened was that I had both the OS X and Mac OS Classic versions of Tex Edit Plus open on my Pismo PowerBook, and had absent-mindedly opened the document I was working on in both programs simultaneously. Cleaning up after my work session, and after saving the working copy, I went at hurriedly closing a bunch of other TE+ files I had open. When the second copy of my column file came forward, I didn't twig until a split-second after affirming the save changes dialog.
Whoops....
What I had done is to save the version of the document I had opened in the other TE+ a couple of hours earlier over the painstakingly composed and finished version. Arrrrrgh!
The last time I lost a significant block of unsaved (or in this instance saved) work was I think back when I was using OS 8 or 9. With the Clasic Mac OS's unprotected memory, it wasn't at all uncommon for programs to crash with no warning, and if one had neglected to save.......
However, if the crash hadn't taken the system down with it, one still had a shot at retreiving their unsaved work from RAM using a cool little free Apple developer utility called MacsBug, which among other things could scan your RAM. I forget how the process, which was somewhat geeky, involving command line entries, worked, but by using keywords you could sometimes locate and recover lost work you would reather not redo. It needed a lot of text cleaning, but that was a lesser evil in many instances.
Maybe there is an OS X utility that can do this sort of thing too, but I'm not aware of any. Fortunately, as I noted, with OS X this sort of incident has been an exceedingly rare ocurrence for me at least. Programs do occasionally crash, but not very often, and fortunately neither are dumb brain fade lapses like the incident described above.
For belt-and-suspenders types, a shareware utility ca\lled KeystrokeRecorder X might be worth consideration.
KeystrokeRecorder X records both email screenshots and keystrokes into a file or sent via email for later retrieval. If you do a lot of typing or if you need to know what another person is typingon your computer, KeystrokeRecorder could be for you.
KeystrokeRecorder X is a background application, and can be configured to prevent other users from detecting the program.
General Features
- Recording Keystrokes - The most obvious feature is that KSR records what you type.
- Recording Screenshots - KSR also takes a snapshot of your screen and optionally emails it or saves it to your hard drive.
- Saving via File or Email - KSR will record keystroke activity to either a text file or to an email address. Choosing KSR file saving feature will result in a text file that is saved to the hard drive for later retrieval. The KSR email feature will send the log files to you via email and will never save the log files to the hard drive, making detection more difficult.
- Smart Preferences - Instead of storing the preferences file under a name that is easily found, the preferences file will be automatically created based on the name of the KSR application name. If you rename KSR to "SPAM Filter" the preferences file will be named "SPAM Filter Prefs ".
- Smart Log File Names - In the preferences, you have the option of setting the log file prefix, suffix, and base. Setting the prefix to "KSR Log ", the suffix to ".txt" and turning on the base will create a log file named "KSR Log 20020319.txt". The number represents the date, in this case, March 19, 2002. This gives you the choice of having one large log file or one log for each day the computer is used.
- Additional Log Information - KSR includes the name of the active application or process when the key was typed as well as the date and time.
- Adjustable Key Queue - You can adjust the length of the KeystrokeRecorder key queue from 5 to 30,000. A smaller queue will cause more frequent saving to the hard drive or more emails sent.
- Automatic or Manual Log Cleaning - The backspace and delete keys are pressed very often. KSR gives you a choice of removing these tags from your logs or emails automatically or with the prefs editor.
- Stealth Features
- Invisible in the Dock.
- Invisible in the Force Quit Menu.
- Practically invisible in the Process Viewer.
- Creates a single or daily log file.
- Optionally sends log files to you via email.
- Adds date, time, and active application in the log file.
- Can be renamed and the icon can be changed to avoid detection.
- Can secretly record everything that is typed on the computer!
- Prefs are optionally encrypted.
- Log files are optionally encrypted.
- Saves or emails screenshots from all displays or just the main display.
System requirements:
Mac OS X 10.1 or later.
$29.00 Demoware
For more information, visit:
http://www.campsoftware.com/products/ksr.htm
However, I'm not sure that Keystrokes Recorder would have been much help in recovering my lost column, since I was doing a lot of cut and paste moving stuff around in the article and making minor changes and refinements in successive rewrites for the last hour or so before I finished. I suppose the data would have been there, but reconfiguring it might have takes as long or longer than just rewrtting the piece, which is what I gritted my teeth and did.
Charles W. Moore
Tags: Blogs ď OSX Odyssey ď
Other solutions to prevent or minimize data loss are to use Time Machine (which backs up on the hour), auto-save, or, for those worried about saving over a good copy, Software like Pages that keeps a backup of your prior save. For the truly paranoid, BBEdit can keep every save as a time stamped version of the file, which permits easy rollback to any prior version.