Forgot to save my spreadsheet before the power flickered yesterday

Working on inventory counts at the warehouse near Salt Lake. Had 3,000 line items done. Power went out for half a second. Lost everything. My buddy Dave just laughed and said "should've hit ctrl+s." Now I have to redo all of Tuesday morning from scratch. Anyone else lose big batches of work to random junk like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

mitchell.nancy2d ago

I mean, 3,000 line items is rough, but it's kind of wild how we just assume everything has auto-save these days. It's like we've gotten so used to our phones and apps saving every little thing for us that we forget the old school stuff still needs manual work. I've noticed this pattern everywhere, not just with spreadsheets. Like people leave their cars unlocked because they figure the automatic locks will catch it, or they don't print a hard copy of important documents because "it's in the cloud." Then when the power flickers or the cloud has an issue, it's just gone. So yeah, your buddy Dave is technically right but also kind of a jerk for laughing about it.

black.jordan3d ago

Man, Dave sounds like the kind of guy who gives advice he never actually follows himself. But seriously, 3,000 line items is a brutal loss. How long did it take you to punch all that in originally like 3 or 4 hours? Did the warehouse have any kind of backup power or was it just a straight flicker that took the whole system down? Feels like there should be some kind of auto save built into that inventory software by now. I mean, spreadsheets have had that feature for like 20 years, so it's wild that something this critical just dumps everything. Makes me wonder what other failsafes are missing that you only find out about the hard way.