I think you've identified the issue here. I was editing a stored copy of a file that still existed externally (as I thought this would be safer than moving them!) and the URL to the local copy was still present. Point 3 above seems to explain the behaviour I was victim of perfectly. It's not clear to me how file|save would work differently though, as I'd have thought this would also be interfered with by the lock on the word temp file, but I'll take your word for it. I clearly don't get the conceptual difference between synchronizing and saving.

I noticed the local copy is updated although Word was used to edit the stored copy retrieved from UR - is this what the URL to the local copy is used for, namely synchronizing to the local copy as well as the stored one?

[PS - could this also explain the problems janriff was having in his 11-16-2007 posting?]

I just tried to edit my document again. This time I did nothing except open the document, edit it, save the document in word and exit word. Nothing got saved in the UR database. My confidence in this is now at rock bottom.

The main download has been updated with a patch for this issue (v3.2.6.3 in Help | About | Install Info afterwards).

Editing a stored document that is also linked to the original external copy complicates sync a bit. The fix ensures that the temp edited copy is always favored over syncing with the other external copy.

No, that did not involve external editing and was the result of two different copies of the same .urd file in different locations getting opened at different times.

External document changes won't get saved in UR's stored copy until one of a) auto-save kicks in or File | Save is done (with selection still at that item), b) Tools | Save All External Documents is performed, c) the database is closed, or d) UR is exited.

Thanks for your effort sorting this out. As far as I can see it works fine now.

One situation you can still lose some editing is if you have a doc opened externally in word, then exit UR with the document still open. In this case it seems UR will be updated only to the last time the document was saved in word. This seems pretty reasonable behaviour though.

When the doc is then closed in word it will still prompt to save the outstanding changes and go ahead with the save without any warnings, but I've no idea where the changes are saved to as neither the local copy or the UR copy subsequently seems to be fully up to date. I guess word just makes a new temp file, then deletes it when it exits. Or maybe writes it happily to the old UR temp file, but when UR opens again it discards it.