HELP Please! Document has reverted back 5 days

[SuAndMac]

I have been working on a magazine for this whole week (Quark Xpress v6) and finally got it signed off yesterday. Shut down the computer and had a well earned drink.
When I turned on the computer this morning the document has reverted back to last Tuesday! (meaning a lot of lost work).
Would this have anything to do with changing permissions? (I did play around with file info on some other files.)
I have 15 other jobs going and they all seem to be fine.
I have dual 80gb hard drives - and yes, after every big lot of changes I backed up the job - but the backup drive says the same!! Anyone with any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Blue Velvet]

I know Quark 6 is a horrible clunky nightmare but this is weird.

There's not the slightest chance you've been working on a different document? I've occasionally done it before...

What back-up software are you using? Most programs will alert you if a file of the same name has an earlier modification date...

What file info did you 'play around with'?

 

[SuAndMac]

Thanks for responding so quickly. No, no chance of a different document. It is a very unique magazine. I have been working on this mag since last Monday - and have opened and closed it countless times. This is really STRANGE.
I'm not using backup software. I just use the 2nd hard drive to "double back up" in case. I do this at least once a day - or if I have done major changes to a job
With the permissions thing - I did a "file info" in another totally different job folder and went to details and changed the "group" access to "read and write" (cause it wasn't letting me save things in that folder even though me being the owner it said "read and write).
I am not on a network or anything - just a stand-alone osx 10.3.3
Have done a check and it doesn't seem to have affected anything else

 

[MisterMe]

Thanks for responding so quickly. No, no chance of a different document. It is a very unique magazine. I have been working on this mag since last Monday - and have opened and closed it countless times. This is really STRANGE.
I'm not using backup software. I just use the 2nd hard drive to "double back up" in case. I do this at least once a day - or if I have done major changes to a job
With the permissions thing - I did a "file info" in another totally different job folder and went to details and changed the "group" access to "read and write" (cause it wasn't letting me save things in that folder even though me being the owner it said "read and write).
I am not on a network or anything - just a stand-alone osx 10.3.3
Have done a check and it doesn't seem to have affected anything else

Files don't just suddenly revert to previous versions. It would appear that you last edited the file in your "double back up," that your back up file replaced your working file, or that you did not save your latest work.

 

[SuAndMac]

Yeah - I must have done something stupid - I really can't think how I did it though. I am usually really careful and have been doing this job for over 15 years - but maybe the long hours are taking their toll.
Thanks for the help - me having a panic attack doesn't get the job finished. I guess I'll just have to try to work out what went wrong and make sure it doesn't happen again.
On that note - can you guys recommend a good backup system (seperate from my hard drive)? It needs to be BIG - my current job folder is 16gb - lots of photoshop files etc. And I need to be able to back up/replace after each major change or at the end of the day.

 

[Blue Velvet]

Why don't you use something like Silverkeeper to back your entire boot drive up to your 2nd internal drive.

It makes life a lot easier than doing it manually. Like most backup software, it won't overwrite files that haven't changed. You can set it to a schedule or even create a bootable back-up...

Using something like this or Dantz Retrospect with an external hard-drive and CD/DVD backups kept off-site of completed work is a pretty reliable method of backing-up.