Problem with Autorecovery in Excel 2003 (over RDC)
 

Hello everyone, I have a bit of a problem. Before I will present the issue
itself, few words of introduction:

We have an office in Poland, from which users are connecting to central
London office, and its servers (to the cluster of terminal servers - they are
being dynamicaly assigned to one of the servers within cluster by the load
balancer) using Remote Desktop Connection.
Amongst few other problem we are experiencing with that setup there is one
that is most painful to us lately - sometimes we have problems with the
connection - high pings, dropped packets, sometimes disconnections altogether
- session is then being terminated. It doesn't happen to often (once every
two weeks), but there are days when it happens repeatedly;

So here is the thing - users, that are working on excel spreadsheets, were
saying that ater session was being terminated they didn't see the changes (if
they weren't saving files manualy). We have set up the Autorecover function
(Tools-Options-Save-'Save Autorecover info every:' - 2 minutes). However
problems with connection ocurred lately and someone was very upset, because
apparently have lost few hours of work (not everyone saves manually...) -
there were no changes ib the file.

Now the question: How does the autorecover work then? I know that in
previous version of Excel there was Autosave function, that was overwriting
original file (corruption was possible, but happened rarely); so what about
autorecover? How does it work? Is there something that needs to be done to
recover file, or should changes be visible after opening it straight away,
and it just doesn't work here?

I have found some info on MS sites that Autorecove creates separate files
with changes (but how to apply them later wasn't said there), and that there
were few conditions for such file to be created and ammended (changes have to
be made to the original file, there has to be 30 sec. inactivity period,
etc.), and that those files may be deleted under few circumstances - ie. when
user closes Excel with or without saving changes in the file - does the
termination of the session (due to disconnection) is being treated as closure
of the Excel by the user, and this is the problem?


Does anyone have an idea what do we have to do in order to get it to work,
or knows any workaround?

Many thanks in advance,

Chris

Problem with Autorecovery in Excel 2003 (over RDC)
 

I have not been completely thrilled with Autorecover and Autosave. Sometimes
they help, but I often can't tell whether the supposedly new file is really
newer than the one I saved. I've learned to do Save As then compare them.

I use a free third party add-in called AutoSafe, available on Jan Karel
Pieterse's web site (http://jkp-ads.com). It saves copies of open files at
preset intervals, and when it saves a new copy, the old one goes into the
recycle bin, which serves informally as an archive.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. - http://PeltierTech.com
_______


"Adrenaline" wrote in message
...
Hello everyone, I have a bit of a problem. Before I will present the issue
itself, few words of introduction:

We have an office in Poland, from which users are connecting to central
London office, and its servers (to the cluster of terminal servers - they
are
being dynamicaly assigned to one of the servers within cluster by the load
balancer) using Remote Desktop Connection.
Amongst few other problem we are experiencing with that setup there is one
that is most painful to us lately - sometimes we have problems with the
connection - high pings, dropped packets, sometimes disconnections
altogether
- session is then being terminated. It doesn't happen to often (once every
two weeks), but there are days when it happens repeatedly;

So here is the thing - users, that are working on excel spreadsheets, were
saying that ater session was being terminated they didn't see the changes
(if
they weren't saving files manualy). We have set up the Autorecover
function
(Tools-Options-Save-'Save Autorecover info every:' - 2 minutes).
However
problems with connection ocurred lately and someone was very upset,
because
apparently have lost few hours of work (not everyone saves manually...) -
there were no changes ib the file.

Now the question: How does the autorecover work then? I know that in
previous version of Excel there was Autosave function, that was
overwriting
original file (corruption was possible, but happened rarely); so what
about
autorecover? How does it work? Is there something that needs to be done to
recover file, or should changes be visible after opening it straight away,
and it just doesn't work here?

I have found some info on MS sites that Autorecove creates separate files
with changes (but how to apply them later wasn't said there), and that
there
were few conditions for such file to be created and ammended (changes have
to
be made to the original file, there has to be 30 sec. inactivity period,
etc.), and that those files may be deleted under few circumstances - ie.
when
user closes Excel with or without saving changes in the file - does the
termination of the session (due to disconnection) is being treated as
closure
of the Excel by the user, and this is the problem?


Does anyone have an idea what do we have to do in order to get it to work,
or knows any workaround?

Many thanks in advance,

Chris