Document changes intermittently lost on save

Question

We can't 100% rule out that this is not human error, but different users have made changes to Excel or Word documents and intermittently these changes have not been saved. No error is displayed to the user when this happens.

We have checked the SharePoint logs and Event Viewer and there isn't anything out of the ordinary.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

If you have Versioning enabled I would check that the following isn't happening:

1. User A downloads a document (version 1) and makes some changes
2. User B downloads the same document (version 1) and makes some changes
3. User A uploads their changes (version 2)
4. User B uploads their changes, overwriting user A's work (version 3)

If this is happening then it should be quite quick to spot by checking the version history when someone complains.

If you haven't got Versioning enabled, then I would strongly recommend that you add it to the affected libraries.