I'm in the depths of despair.

[lettered]

My Word docs keep getting . . . corrupted somehow. I'll save a file, and when I go to open it again, both the top and bottom have a lot of extra text that mostly seems to be about what directory the file was saved in. All the italics (and other kids of formatting) are lost. And worst of all, it's as if the text's been chopped up into chunks--sometimes cutting sentences or words in half--and then tossed like a salad, so that I have to try to figure out how everything fits together again. And some things are lost entirely. . . especially if I had the file saved, then went back in and changed a couple words, saved it again--even if I rename the file after the little tweaks. It's been going on for a while with a random file here and there, but lately it's been getting worse, doing it with every single file.

Has anyone ever experienced anything like this? Does it sounds like a Word problem, or is it my computer, is it a virus? Any advice?

It's fucked up three fics so far, and one I'm not sure I can put back together again.

Also, every once in a while my keyboard just stops working. Everything else will work, but the keyboard is completely crapped out. When I reset the computer, everything works fine.

Comments

[entrenous88.livejournal.com]

Ack, so sorry you're having this problem! It's awful losing work.

I'd suggest a back-up of saving work to your LJ (you can mark it private) or to a community LJ of which you're the only member/maintainer. I have a community like that, created in part during my last job so that I could save things while I was at work. But it's great as a resource for backing up fic files as well.

[tkp.livejournal.com]

Yeah! I was thinking about using my lj. I like the idea of starting a comm for it though, then it's not all mixed up with my regular posts. Thanks so much for the advice!

[entrenous88.livejournal.com]

Yay! I love having the comm for saving and editing work. I know people who have created alternate LJs for the same purpose, but with a comm you don't have to log out all the damn time.