how to fix my data

[dmoh]

I was doing manual editing to my data. and then suddenly it closed while i was saving it. when i reopened it the raw data structure has changed. all the categorical variables have changed into different numbers and continuous variables have mostly changed into exponential numbers.

[Richard Williams]

Sorry, I don't see anything at all obvious. Hopefully you have a backup.

Personally, I like to use dropbox or some other online storage system. Just be careful you don't put anything too super-confidential there. Here is a link if you want to create a dropbox account: https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NT...OQ?src=global9

Almost every semester, I would have a student who lost a paper because her hard drive crashed. Those problems seem to be much less common now that things like dropbox are around. I put most of my active work in dropbox and regularly back up everything to an external hard disk.

[Sergiy Radyakin]

dmoh, the data that you show on the screen looks like random noise. don't use this for research. go back to the data source prior to your edits.
In Windows, programs usually don't just "close", an error message is displayed. You tell the developers about the error message and they take it from there.
It seems you are using a Mac, so I don't know how it behaves, but I expect something similar.

It is important to find the source of error: from the problem slide it follows that the file header is correct (variable types and names survived) but the data is wrong already in the first observation. This would be a rather rare coincidence if there was a hardware failure right at the switch between the header and data. Contact StataCorp.

Do backups as Richard explains (though I don't support dropbox for such a purpose, but it depends).

Best, Sergiy

[Konrad Zdeb]

Dmoh,

Do you have Time Machine running on Mac? If you logged in your manual edits you could simply re-run what you did. Does the data editor crashes all the time (hint)? When did this happen? If you feel so inclined you may attempt to read your RAM content and see if you can salvage anything.