Eric Mack On-Line

Eric, that's terrible and I'm sorry we let you and Amy and Wendy down, although I have to say it's a bit of a mystery. You're right that Ctrl-S is not needed in OneNote. Ctrl-S actually does force a save (because we couldn't have it do anything else given many people's reflexive use of it), but because a save is happening every 30sec or less anyway it is completely unnecessary.

I think what may have happened here is a perfect storm of unlikely happenings.

First, doing a Cut rather than a Copy to get the text out of OneNote put Amy and Wendy's information in a precarious state. By doing a "Cut" you are telling OneNote "I do not want this anymore". So OneNote believes the information is gone. Of course at that point you can still Undo, but the information is not being looked after by any process.

OneNote performs a backup of your notes daily (by default), backing up only files that have changed in the last 24 hrs. It will keep the last two versions of these files. This is not intended to be an alternative to Undo. It is meant to guard against data loss where the files you have get deleted for some reason, or you accidentally delete some of your (day old or more) notes and don't notice (i.e. do not use Undo) but later want them back. The backup model assumes that you will use Undo if you delete something by accident you just wrote today (not a perfect assumption).

Now, when you pasted into Word, I have no idea why the Paste didn't work. I'd have to see the files involved to see if something weird was going on (such as the paste location in Word would not accept text for whatever reason).

As to why Undo stopped working in OneNote, the likely cause is that there are a small set of things you can do which cause the Undo stack for a page to get cleared. Amy or Wendy clicked around to other pages or did some kind of notebook level change (moved pages or something like that) which is something that will cause the Undo stack to get cleared. OneNote actually maintains a separate Undo stack for each page - you can see this if you make an edit on one page, go to another page, make an edit, then go back to the first and use Ctrl-Z. You can undo the change on the first page without having to Undo the change that happened later on page 2 (you cannot do this in Word for example). There is also the "navigation stack" (the back and forward history buttons). The forward list gets cleared when you make changes to pages.

Bottom line is something weird happened (the paste failing) and because a cut was done rather than copy, and the edits were all done inside the backup time window, and (I guess) some kind of actions were taken in OneNote afterward perhaps in a panic that made the Undo stack get cleared you're out of luck. I am truly sorry for Amy and Wendy.

FWIW, my ex-sister-in-law had a similar experience with Word when writing her master's thesis. First, she had no backup (oh so common). She had been writing all day. She was trying to start a new sentence with a capital A and as far as I can tell she missed the Shift key and slipped onto Ctrl. Ctrl-A of course selects the entire document contents in Word, and because Word defaults to replacing a selection when you type, the very next key she typed (she didn't even notice this at 60wpm) replaced her entire document with that letter. She called me in a panic and asked what to do because Word had "deleted her entire document except what she had just typed". I told her to use Undo, but because she thought her work was somehow still in Word she said she had quit Word and of course said Yes when Word asked if she wanted to Save her work. At that point she was toast. It may be obvious to you an me what her error was, but because her mental model was different she was taking actions that made sense to her.

There've been experiments with trying to solve this problem (that people can inadvertently lose their work in these complex interplays) over the years. OneNote took the approach of always saving to avoid the problem where you have to decide to keep your work. That was mainly done for ease of use and of course it is many people's favorite feature - not having to name or locate files. And with daily backups the thinking was that at least you can't lose anything older than a day if you do mess up and don't use Undo. That means there is a day long window for the problem to occur though (as Amy and Wendy found). And of course information can be lost if you delete something, don’t notice, and then keep using the notebook for several more days, unless you modify the defaults for backup and are willing to use a lot more drive space than we thought we could force on people.

There've been experiments with saving a backup constantly, but if you don't want these to fill your drive over time they eventually have to start overwriting each other, so a high backup frequency can spell problems if you don't notice the problem soon enough (all your backups will have the error too).

Other ideas include saving the entire undo stack in a document or at least on your machine even if you close the application. This is promising but saving (in document) can cause privacy issues (if you mail the doc to someone else and they use Ctrl-Z), and saving outside the document means the edits can get divorced from the file (such as if you access the file from another machine). Even more radical is to treat everything you do as a giant database that records all the transactions. This is fine for relatively simple edits but Undo is also much harder to make work in all cases than you might think given the combination of things that can be done in an application of reasonable complexity and things that can be done out of order that might affect each other (e.g. add a hyperlink on a page to something that is later deleted), so it isn't always possible to maintain the undo stack through every conceivable user activity.

OK, enough excuses. I am really sorry.

Chris

Posted at 04/04/2007 10:40:19 by Chris Pratley (MS)