Sometimes, you’ve got to learn things the hard way, like I did the other day. I have multiple spreadsheets open on my desktop at one time, most of them in Numbers. Up until recently, I was using Excel for all of my spreadsheet duties, but once my wife started showing me the cool things she could do with Numbers, I switched teams. It may not be as powerful or universal as Excel, but Numbers is now my No 1. spreadsheet tool.
But then Numbers crashed one day, and I lost a good day’s worth of work. Why? I wasn’t quite sure, because I figured that Numbers just had to have an autosave feature, just like Excel. Nope, turns out it doesn’t, so I was screwed. I had to spend some time recovering that work, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Then I learned about ForeverSave. The program acts like Time Machine for your open documents. Although the setup process is a bit of a pain in the ass, once you have all of your saving behaviors plugged in, the program works flawlessly. You can adjust it so that any time you switch to the app it saves, or on a timer, or both. Then it keeps backups of your documents, so that if you need to go back and restore something, you’ve got lots of options.
The program doesn’t have many downsides. The setup is tedious, particularly if your establishing routines for multiple programs, but once it’s done you never have to do it again. It’s cheapish – $14.95 – but if that seems high to you, try ForeverSave Lite, which works in the same way for free but takes out the backup copies and versioning. Otherwise, I consider this another one of those programs that Apple forgot – or a feature of iWork, anyways – and a must have. Go download it now, there’s a free 30-day trial.
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