Narrative Safety Save

It has happened to everyone! You are typing along perhaps for several hours, then suddenly you hit the wrong key and "Poof" all your narrative is gone! Maybe it was a power failure or a system "Crash" and your whole machine failed, regardless of the reason, the time you spend writing narrative is generally more time consuming than anything else you do on the computer. When you loose that narrative it can be devastating. Understanding the pain of such a situation, CrimeStar has implemented a Narrative Safety Save feature. This feature automatically saves your narrative text to a file (NSS.TXT) every few minutes, so it may be possible for you to partially or completely recover from such a loss.

The "NSS_Interval" setting in the CrimeStar.INI file determines how frequently (in minutes) your narrative is saved to the file. The default is 10 (Minutes).

The Narrative Safety Save feature is activated as soon as you make a change to the narrative in the edit window and is deactivated as soon as you click or tab out of the edit window.

You can recover text from this file by clicking the Safety Save Recovery button on the Incident Form narrative page, or by simply opening the NSS.TXT file and using NotePad then working with standard cut/copy/paste features.

This feature does not keep a backup copy of all your narratives, and it does not save to different files for different Incident report, it simply save the narrative text from whatever document you are currently working on to the NSS.TXT file.

This feature is not foolproof but in the unlikely event of a loss of your narrative, it may save you many hours of re-typing…. Note that on older or slower computers this feature may interrupt your typing or cause the cursor to jump. If this happens you can turn this feature off by setting the NSS_INTERVAL=0 in the Crimestar INI file.