All Excel spreadsheets missing several months of data

[Bawb]

All my Excel spreadsheets are suddenly missing months of data. The
finder says most were last opened on various days last February (not on
the same date) and one last Sept, even though all these spreadsheets
are used regularly - one a few days ago. Even more wierd, I backup my
files on an external firewire hard drive that I don't leave connect to
the computer. My last backup was a few weeks ago, but the spreadsheets
on the backup show the same old dates as on my computer hard drive - I
used all the spreadsheets multiple times without incident since that
last backup. I have not discovered a problem with any other files,
such as MS Word documents. I am using an iMac G5 with OS X 10.4.6 and
running MS Office:Mac 2004 Student & Teacher Edition Ver 11.2.3. I am
not networked. One other twist, when in Excel, clicking on <File>
lists 9 previous times I opened Excel files. I clicked on the oldest
of one the problem spreadsheets and got an error message that "The file
may be read-only, or you may be trying to access a read-only
location...." I've seen other posts with this error message, but the
symptoms were different. My problem occurred once before - last year -
with one spreadsheet where several weeks of data suddenly disappeared.
I mistakenly assumed that I accidently deleted seveal rows, even though
I couldn't imagine how I would have done that. Neither Apple's nor
Microsoft's tech support had any idea of what is going on and said they
never heard of this problem.

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Neither Apple's nor Microsoft's tech support had any idea of what is
going on and said they never heard of this problem.

This doesn't sound like an XL problem, per se. If the dates on the
files are old, then they're copies of the old workbooks, which is why
they don't have the new data.

It sounds like you're working on multiple copies of your files. Does
Spotlight find any other copies?

 

[Bawb]

No - Spotlight only shows one copy. I never intentionally created
multiple copies.

 

[JE McGimpsey]

No - Spotlight only shows one copy. I never intentionally created
multiple copies.

No idea, then. Are you sure you're saving your changes?

I can't think how a file could be used regularly, saved, and still have
a last modified date several months old...

It sounds more like your backup is restoring the old copy, rather than
copying the new one.

 

[Bawb]

These are files I use regularly, such as payroll, bicycle log, time
log, etc. Of course I save them after making an entry. And each time
I open one of these spreadsheets, all the past data is there, just as
it should be. Except the other day when roughly four months of data
was missing. I can't think of anything unusual that happened, though I
recently installed an OS X security update, but there have been no
updates for Office.