You Know That One About Human Error?

I woke up at 2 AM this morning. Don’t ask why, because I haven’t the faintest idea, but there I was. Since by 3:00 it was clear I wasn’t going to get back to sleep, I turned on the computers and attempted to be productive.

By about 10:30 AM I was nearly finished creating a mind map for the website redesign for a corporate client, based on their suggestions and another site they thought was a good example. I use MindJet’s MindManager Pro 6 software for this. The latest version of MindManager is 8, but I never bothered to upgrade. The program already has more features than I know how to use.

Anyway, I had opened an earlier map to check something that I wanted to add to the current map. I was finished with the earlier map and went to close it, and got prompted with one of those “Do you want to save changes?” dialogs. I hadn’t made any changes to that file, so I said “No.”

And then discovered that I’d just closed the whole program, and lost the last 10 minutes of work I’d done. Four hours of sleep, yeah. Does wonders for the brain function.

I save my work often, and I have most of my programs set to autosave at least every ten minutes. But it turns out I can make a lot of changes to a document in ten minutes, at least if it’s a mind map.

Now, I have Mind Manager set to automatically create .BAK files the way I have Word set to automatically create .WBK files. In Word, the .WBK files preserve an earlier version of the file; you can return to it if the current version gets corrupted somehow. I assumed the same idea held true with MindManager, but I couldn’t even get it to open the .BAK file, so I had no way to tell whether it had preserved my new changes.

I also checked Free Agent Sync on my F:\ drive, but that copy of the file, like the one on my C:\ drive, had not preserved the changes. So I had to go back and re-create all the work I’d just done. And in the process of doing so, I misspelled someone’s name, a thing I normally pride myself on not doing, and probably left a few other things out.

I’ve since gone back and set the autosave in MindManager (it’s under Tools | Options | Save) to 5 minutes. That might keep me out of trouble. But only if I get enough sleep.