For the past few days, I have been working on a Powerpoint presentation on my Windows desktop. Little by little, I added the slides and by late afternoon, I had an almost complete product. At some point in time, I saved it and went out to buy dinner for the family.
3 hours later, I decided to continue working on the finishing touches to the presentation. When I opened the file, I had a rude shock. There was only 10 slides out of the original 60.
Oh no. I must have hit some random “Select-Slides-Delete” keystrokes and saved the entire file without checking.
There was no other way to recover the previous version of the file in my desktop since I have already saved and closed the file earlier.
The thought of re-doing the lost 50 slides was a big setback. But I picked myself up and attempted to start creating the lost slides from memory again.
10 minutes into the re-construction, I recalled Dropbox have this versioning feature that keeps the old versions of over-written files. And it so happened that this file I was working on was stored in the Dropbox sync folder.
So I scavenged the version history of that ill-fated file on the Dropbox website, and really found the old version containing the complete deck!!
Thank goodness for Dropbox. I am able to recover my hard work.
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Thank you, Dropbox. You saved my week.
A good start, or a bad start to the New Year?
P.S. I found out that Mac OS X Lion users would have no such problems because OS X Lion has built-in document versioning. So if I were to work my project on a Mac, I could simply recover old versions locally.