Another recent call we received on the same trip to Alaska was from a distraught estimator in Hawaii. It seems that he had spent five hours on an estimate the night before, and when his ssession crashed at the end of it, the estimate seemed to have evaporated with it. He looked manually where he was sure he’d saved it, searched in Estimating Explorer, all to no avail. The solution was simple though less obvious to many of us than we might care to admit.
The solution, How to Find and Recover a Lost Estimate in Timberline:
I found it by using Windows Explorer, (not Estimating Explorer), by searching the drive where estimates are stored for the first 5 characters in the estimate file name. Sure enough we found it in a different folder from that which he expected it to be, fully intact with its total just as he’d remembered before the crash, not a byte of lost data. (And 5 hours saved, not wasted!)
Takeaway: Try the simplest thing first. When looking for a missing file, spend about 5 minutes max looking based on where you think the file is. Then cut your losses and go straight to Windows Explorer or My Computer, and use its fast, effective Search tool. Time is precious. The computer”s cpu is faster than our brains!
