How automatic settings – and tech companies' aggressive tactics – can make months of work go Poof!
We were pleased to help a published author (and wonderful person) organize his files – setting up a hierarchy of nested folders in his Mac, and moving his existing files to the appropriate locations. This helped him understand the general concept of file organization.
That also led to a lesson about creating new files, and our mantra: If a file doesn't have a name and a location, you don't really have that file. We showed that, when you go to save a file, the resulting dialog box will prompt for a name, and will allow you to "navigate" to a destination. Ignoring this is why so many people's file are all routed to their computer's Desktop (or Downloads folder, or root level of their Documents folder...), and are all named "Untitled." (Well, Untitled 1, Untitled 2, Untitled 3, through Untitled 999...)
You wouldn't take all your tax papers, photos, and medical documents, delete all the titles and cover pages, and store them by throwing all the papers into a single jumble on the living room floor – yet the majority of people are fine doing just that with their computer files.
After organizing this author's existing files, we set him up to start work on a new book, creating a folder solely for that new project (Path: User/Documents/Business/Books/new book title), and then creating the first file in his word processor of choice – no surprise, Microsoft Word. As in just about every app, once that Save path was set, Word routed all new files (one for each chapter...) to that same book folder. He might need a refresher lesson when it came time to put a file in a different location, but, at least while he was working on this project, we'd know where his files should be.
Jump ahead about 6 months, and the midst of the Covid pandemic. The author had been writing all that time, and we assumed that no news was good news – until a phone call brought his panicked message that an entire chapter was missing.
Serious as that sounded, we weren't too worried: If he'd deleted it, Word was likely to have a backup, and the Mac's Time Machine should have had a copy. If it was in the Trash, it could be brought back into the world. If he'd renamed it (likely, by unwittingly clicking on the file's title in the Finder...), or moved it (likely, by unintentionally dragging it...). we could still find it, by its date or title. I began looking, via remote screen-share (in order to remain isolated from each other).
Nothing.
The file was not seen by its title in Word's menu of "Recent" files, and was not in the book folder (where the other chapters had properly been saved) – not under any name or date. A search of the folder via the Finder's Find did not find it. Various searches of the entire Mac, including via "Creation Date," did not find it.
The author had told me he'd created it about a month before, and that it was named "Chapter 5." I began to expand the search criteria, and tried searching for files created two months before. No luck.
He was despondent, and said we should give up. (For a technical explanation on how to proceed in such situations, see here, courtesy of Paramount Pictures.) I asked to continue – on my own time – and did so (still via screen share), for a total of several hours, spread over the next couple of weeks.
Nothing.
I decided to look even further afield, with two different tactics: I asked the author to tell me the name of a place or person who was introduced for the first time in this chapter, and I searched with the Mac's Spotlight feature, rather than in the Finder.
Bingo.
Turns out, the file was named something utterly different that what he had thought, and had been created months earlier than he had remembered; I'd found it based on the unique name within the body of the chapter. But even if I'd searched for that across the entire Mac, in a date range for the entire preceding year, I wouldn't have found anything: Spotlight was showing me the file, and, to my amazement, it was not in the Mac.
Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage had hijacked its location.
After months of dutifully sending newly creating files to the correct book folder, something in MS Word had changed: It had set a new Save location, namely: Microsoft's cloud storage.
For other users of MS Office, this is probably not a shock: We are deluged with prompts/requests/begging and pleading from MS to use OneDrive, their cloud service (akin to iCloud, Google Drive, etc.). Saying No never seems to stop the onslaught.
Perhaps the author succumbed to these entreaties, but he assured me, adamantly, that he had not. My suspicion is that an automatic update of the app brought in a new version, which had a default state to save to OneDrive, and it did so. Or it innocently phrased the request, fooling the user (Looking at you, Apple, and the little "Updates" that are really upgrades to a whole new system, with huge ramifications for many users...) The first time he created a new file following that change by Word, it went up to the cloud rather than down to his Mac.
As you can imagine, after re-directing the file to the original folder in the Mac (and re-naming it...), I turned off automatic update in Office, and deleted as much of OneDrive as possible (which is how Office is set in my own Mac. That hasn't stopped the begging and pleading.)
So can you trust your file organization to cloud storage?
I don't want to seem too hard on MS – not only because this didn't occur on my own Mac, but because this incident is small-time compared to what I've seen disappear from many users' accounts with Apple's iCloud. Suffice to say, we do not entrust our Mac's files to iCloud's Desktop and Documents. But that's a separate blog post...
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