World Enough and Time

There's a Captain Jack story I plan to post tonight or tomorrow, and I've been having problems with it. Not creative problems, technical problems. Can someone who knows more about computer software than I do maybe offer some advice?

I wrote this story in WordPerfect, which is my favourite program to write with for numerous reasons. Saved it as an .rtf file and sent it to my wonderful beta-reader, rosiespark, who returned it with useful comments. I rewrote it, again in my original .rtf file. Poked at it a few times later. Let it sit for a while, not by intent, just because I was busy.

So I went back to it a week or so ago and discovered, to my horror, that when I opened the story there were no words in the file. Luckily I still had the betaed copy from rosiespark. So I used that as my main copy, deleted her comments, and was rewriting it. I was working on it again last night and decided to go to bed and finish it this morning.

This morning, once again, my copied file was empty.

So what happened? Too much switching between .rtf, Word, and WordPerfect?

I have one more proofreading and revision to do, and then I'll post it. Believe me, I have many copies of it now, in several formats, including one online. Hah! I'll nail that sucker yet.

But I'd like to know what I did wrong, so I can never do it again.