Has anyone come across the following problem before - I've only come across this in Excel 2003 running on Windows 2000 Server.

Every so often, when trying to save a workbook that has been open for some time, I get an error message along the lines of "the directory ... cannot be accessed or is full. Workbook cannot be saved." followed by another, "AutoRecover has been disabled for this session".

When this first happened, I assumed our server had crashed or was suffering congestion. After all, this usually happens at the same time as our Outlook reports "waiting for data from Exchange Server...".

However, after this point, trying to 'Save As' to ANY other location (local disk, USB flash disk, Desktop etc) repeats the same error message (cannot access or is full) and yet, all other programs will, at the same time, continue saving quite happily to anywhere (server, local or removable).

It would appear that Excel 2003, when getting disconnected from a server path, doesn't attempt to retry the connection and also applies the 'lost connection' flag to all other drives selected, until the application is shut down. This means that all you can do at this point is close down, lose all the changes, with no chance of autorecovery.

Has anyone else come across this?

Yup, I used to experience this all the time at one little cheap company I
worked for a couple of years ago. I got to where I saved almost every row I
entered, just out of self defense. Of course the normal answer is to
download the file and not work off the network, but that just wasn't
practical for me at the time. The only way I was ever able to save during
one of those episodes was to copy and paste the data over into another
workbook and go from there. Once the line of breadcrumbs is broken, Excel
just can't seem to find it's way back home. On my current larger programs, I
now include both "semiautomatic" and manual Archiving means to save the file
off to another directory as a backup with a datetime code in the ArchiveName.
So far, it's worked out pretty good.

hth
Vaya con Dios,
Chuck, CABGx3



"BizMark" wrote:


Has anyone come across the following problem before - I've only come
across this in Excel 2003 running on Windows 2000 Server.

Every so often, when trying to save a workbook that has been open for
some time, I get an error message along the lines of "the directory ...
cannot be accessed or is full. Workbook cannot be saved." followed by
another, "AutoRecover has been disabled for this session".

When this first happened, I assumed our server had crashed or was
suffering congestion. After all, this usually happens at the same time
as our Outlook reports "waiting for data from Exchange Server...".

However, after this point, trying to 'Save As' to ANY other location
(local disk, USB flash disk, Desktop etc) repeats the same error
message (cannot access or is full) and yet, all other programs will, at
the same time, continue saving quite happily to anywhere (server, local
or removable).

It would appear that Excel 2003, when getting disconnected from a
server path, doesn't attempt to retry the connection and also applies
the 'lost connection' flag to all other drives selected, until the
application is shut down. This means that all you can do at this point
is close down, lose all the changes, with no chance of autorecovery.

Has anyone else come across this?


--
BizMark