Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Jarte

Am on Windows 7 for PC. On January 15 I downloaded 'Jarte' from this site. It's a free word-processor that rivals Open Office. I opened it today and worked on a file for 5 hours, researching and writing a 1200-word report. My computer then crashed for the first time ever. I power back up, no sign of my Jarte file. I then look at Jarte settings and see that default autosave setting is switched to 'Off' when you download it. This means i never saved my file, and I never even gave it a name. It's my fault for not saving, I'd just point out that these days we're accustomed to leaving everything to autosave, so I'm surprising this has happened.

My question is, are there any solutions within Jarte or Windows 7 to get my work back? Surely the unsaved text I wrote is on some temporary file somewhere, or deep in my hard drive?

If not, I am in deep trouble.

Reply 1 : Jarte

I should add that Jarte files are saved as .rtf format.

Reply 2 : Jarte

Probably you lost it. Luckily, your trouble is only 5 hours deep, at most.

Kees

Reply 3 : Jarte

I heard someone say cops can now retrace keystrokes on bad guys' computers. If they can do that in the law enforcement world, surely we can get back some text in the real world ?!

(I'm still in the denial-about-how-bad-i-messed-up phase, I guess)

Reply 4 : Jarte

Nope... For all intents and purposes, the data is gone. There is some research showing that RAM isn't quite as transitory as we're all taught, but odds are you overwrote the data stored in RAM many times over just by booting the computer again, so even if you were in a fully equipped lab, it'd probably be faster to just start over from scratch.

And first off there are a lot of fantastical claims about what law enforcement agencies can and can't do. Most of the stuff you see on shows like CSI, is either made up for good TV, or they're using something that is in the early prototype stages in reality, not even close to ready for any kind of real world use. Furthermore, law enforcement agencies usually have a lot of time and monetary resources the average person does not. You never hear about how reconstructing the activities of some crook took them 3 years and $2 million, and the ne'er do well was out doing bad things that whole time, because that doesn't fit the sensational story of catching the bad guy in the end.

Long story short, if you didn't save it, it's gone, the end. And if it's likely going to take you more than 5 hours to reconstruct this, then what exactly is it you're saving?

Just think of what you lost as a first draft. You've run through it in your head once, started crystallizing your thesis and supporting arguments, so the next run through should let you avoid some of the areas that maybe didn't work very well, etc.

Finally, the format you're saving in really doesn't make a bit of difference if the file was never saved in the first place.

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