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Anyone else had this problem? Our IT team is stumped.
At random occurrences when we click on "save" in a word document word just instantly vanishes. Word is gone. The document is gone. There is no back up of the document despite setting the backup feature to every 2 minutes. Little is worse than working for two hours and having it disappear when you try to save it.
IT cannot find anything because they cannot replicate the problem. It happens at random and it happens to multiple users.We each have our own computer. We save to Onedrive but the back up is to the Users - roaming- office- word - - -- path. There are some documents in that back up file but none of them can be opened.
Although I don't know how your systems are configured, I can guess what is happening is that you have cache problems. They have been around for ages and got worse in early Windows networking.
A physical write from cache to a drive sometimes doesn't work or doesn't happen. Then, when there is an error somewhere, it all goes pear shaped and stuff that a program SAYS was saved never was and is completely lost. I have no idea how many levels of caches you have or how you network, but there are caches in the processors, caches on drives, network caches, caches that exist above caches. Mostly they work properly and speed things along, but sometimes they don't.
I first became aware of such issues when I had my multiple point POS stations updating serial number files on a master computer back before the turn of the century. I could not reliably get serial number files updated properly every sale, even if I tried to force a write. I tried every trick in the book to bypass the network caching and still had times that updates weren't handled properly by the OS and networking software. I ended up creating workarounds that resolved things, but those were specific to my software and won't work for you. It still irritates me that I had to, in essence, write an error handler for Windows networking failures, and another one for when things got REALLY f***ed up and I had to rebuild data.
Finding the root of a cache failure can be a bear beyond the capabilities of many people, even if they have a general idea of the issue. FWIW, I seem to remember some hardware was better than others at doing what I wanted, so I wouldn't rule out hardware problems.
The kludge that you can resort to until there is a fix is to do multiple manual saves, preferably alternating between drives, every few minutes with different file names and even using different file types. At the top of the hour, you might save Temp1, at quarter after Temp2, etc. The point is to NOT overwrite your last successful backup file as auto backup and restore commonly do, but have at least two completely independent files. DOing so not only gives you a backup of your backup, but is more likely to push an actual write of the files. It is good to stretch every 20 minutes anyway, so set a timer and save your work then stretch.
Understand though, it has been years since I messed with this, and there may be simpler ways to set up saves now.
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