To Charles Kenyon and Paul (Macropod) Edstein:

This may need to be moved to the “Rant” section if there is one. Your call.

First, thank you both for your rapid responses. I’ve never known anything said by either of you on this forum to be wrong, so I’ll take what you say as gospel.

That said, I am both stunned and mystified that this Word “problem with jump drives” isn’t major news. (Okay, maybe is WAS and I missed it. A quick and dirty Google search showed it was extant at least 3 years ago). As a Word user for at least 20 years, I’m stunned that I’ve never heard of this until now. I’ve routinely kept my daily journal file on an SD card that was almost never removed from the slot on my Dell laptop, and never had any problems until now. The part which mystifies me is why a major bug in a major program like MS Word wouldn’t have prompted Microsoft to have Word warn users when saving to an “alternate” drive with something in flashing red text reading: “WARNING: Word doesn’t do well with saving files to jump drives. Do you still want to proceed?” It could be a feature that one could turn off if the warning was not wanted. I know no one on these forums officially represents Microsoft, but I hope someone will suggest a fix.

I will obviously amend my storage locations and backup practices to take this issue into account, and I only have you folks to thank for letting me know about this issue. I started keeping my journal file on an SD card a long time ago, at first due to an older HD that I was afraid was approaching failure and on my current laptop because of an SSD, which (to me) is just a big flash drive inside my laptop housing.

Rick Joslin