Dealing with Corrupted Files.

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My mom uses MS Publisher to create a lot of things for her business. She is comfortable with Publisher and has no interest in switching to Adobe InDesign etc. Once in awhile, one of her publisher files will get corrupted. The crappy part is that when I searched one of her three backups of the file (saved as a full image backup). The file was corrupted on all three images. So I guess what I'm asking is how do I protect her data?

Are MS Publisher files prone to corruption?

The OS seems stable, up-to-date definitions and all patches are downloaded....everything else functions OK. No "Smart errors", strange hard drive noises or errors when running scandisk.

What would you suggest?

Well, nothing about backups will prevent file corruption if the file got corrupted BEFORE the backup. I find most file corruptions come from a save where something interfered with the file during the save. Sadly, you really can't know if this happened until you go to reopen the file.

More and more documents are too complex to "repair" if corrupted. Unlike a text file which is a string of characters, more and more documents have complex codes and if too much of it gets mangled, the file is unreadable.

Maybe someone else has better advice.

My best advice for the future is that when you save a file, make sure you can open it again. This should be obvious when you work on it regularly, but if it just make something and never use it for a long time, make sure it saved okay before you put it away for a while.

MS Publisher has an autosave feature that runs in the background. It seems like this could be counterproductive. I don't know if it saves regardless if the file is "dirty" or not (changed in anyway). I would rather miss a few updates with the file rather than corrupting the file beyond all repair.

I turned it off. Don't know if this will make a difference.

I manually create a backup of every important file prior to editing it. By the end of the week I've often got several versions of every file, each in a zipped date/time stamped folder. Once a week I cut the lot to CD. CD's are cheap. Time to take a backup is negligible.

It just seems a common sense way of working. If something goes badly wrong and I get a corrupt file, at worse I've lost half hours work. It does happen occasionally.

There are still people out there who work with some important file such as a phd thesis or book and leave it on a laptop never backed up. Laptop gets stolen or hard drive fails and they've lost the lot.