Mac OS' strange way of handling flash drives made me lose my school project

[DarthSmartt]

I was working on my school project that i had just finished in a word document. My flash drive came loose and mac decided that it would just close my unsaved word documents (I thought word 2016 had autosave anyway). Windows would have just left them opened and not let me save it until the flash drive was fully reinserted. Word doesn't have the updated document in recents just the old one. What can I do to get this back? 

[Ashleyyyy]

i found this:

https://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/mac-software/how-recover-lost-documents-in-word-for-mac-3655085/

 

will that help? i don't use Mac so i don't know.. sorry.. 

[Wh0_Am_1]

12 minutes ago, DarthSmartt said:

I was working on my school project that i had just finished in a word document. My flash drive came loose and mac decided that it would just close my unsaved word documents (I thought word 2016 had autosave anyway). Windows would have just left them opened and not let me save it until the flash drive was fully reinserted. Word doesn't have the updated document in recents just the old one. What can I do to get this back? 

Ouch!!! I'm sorry that work is gone all computers store unsaved memory in the RAM and that memory was volatile, it requires power to remain active and modern PCs delete all unnecessary data to save power, and RAM is a valuable resource to a computer, basically as soon as that program closed, all hope of recovery was lost... I am so sorry but it's gone. To avoid such a huge issue in the future I would recommend the use of Google docs, because that program is free and auto updates after every keystroke, on top of that it already has a large community of users, and is therefore near universal in the Western world.

[DrMacintosh]

28 minutes ago, DarthSmartt said:

Windows would have just left them opened and not let me save it until the flash drive was fully reinserted.

That is not really a macOS thing or an issue with Word, more so it is an issue with how computers work when it comes to handing drives and data. 

 

Also, why are you even using Microsoft products on a Mac? Apple provides Pages, Keynote, and Numbers for free and those apps are compatible with Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents respectively. 

 

28 minutes ago, DarthSmartt said:

(I thought word 2016 had autosave anyway)

If it did it would store it as a temp file somewhere, and if that file was in the flash drive then the reason you lost the file was because the drive fell out and was not actually saved onto the drive. 

 

Google Drive is a good way to keep reliable records of your work, but it is not as feature packed as something like Pages or Word. 

[vanished]

49 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

That is not really a macOS thing or an issue with Word, more so it is an issue with how computers work when it comes to handing drives and data.

I just tried this with Word 2016 and Windows 10: I plugged in a flash drive, made a new word doc, opened it, wrote a bit, saved it, wrote a bit more, unplugged the flash drive, then tried to save, and it said it couldn't and prompted me to save somewhere else, as if I'd done a "save as".

 

This is the expected behaviour.  There is no way the app should just close or crash upon the file becoming unavailable.  I'm not sure if this was just a fluke, or if this is an issue in MacOS, or Word for Mac, but it definitely should not have happened, and should not be expected as you seem to suggest.

[DrMacintosh]

18 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I just tried this with Word 2016 and Windows 10: I plugged in a flash drive, made a new word doc, opened it, wrote a bit, saved it, wrote a bit more, unplugged the flash drive, then tried to save, and it said it couldn't and prompted me to save somewhere else, as if I'd done a "save as".

 

This is the expected behaviour.  There is no way the app should just close or crash upon the file becoming unavailable.  I'm not sure if this was just a fluke, or if this is an issue in MacOS, or Word for Mac, but it definitely should not have happened, and should not be expected as you seem to suggest.

Tried this just now with Pages. 

 

New Document> Blank> typed "This is a test"> Save> USB Drive> typed "This is a test" again> removed USB Drive> Saved> was prompted to save as

 

This was a glitch on MS Words part. 

[vanished]

Just now, DrMacintosh said:

Tried this just now with Pages. 

 

New Document> Blank> typed "This is a test"> Save> USB Drive> typed "This is a test" again> removed USB Drive> Saved> was prompted to save as

 

This was a glitch on MS Words part. 

That is encouraging.  Even despite the recent slew of issues I remember and still think of Mac OS as something good enough to not do this.

[DrMacintosh]

2 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

That is encouraging.  Even despite the recent slew of issues I remember and still think of Mac OS as something good enough to not do this.

The reason it crashed might have been because of the auto save feature now that I think about it lol

[vanished]

Just now, DrMacintosh said:

The reason it crashed might have been because of the auto save feature now that I think about it lol

Perhaps.  Without more testing we can only speculate, but at least it would seem that it's not standard procedure for Mac OS to close any application without confirmation if the file it's working on becomes unavailable, which is good to hear