Error: "Document could not be saved"

Question

Hi all!
I regularly receive an error, "Document could not be saved", in OS X after a while of usage. It can come after 10 minutes of usage, or after 10 hours of usage. It affects ALL open applications and documents, and doesn't solve with anything but a restart of the entire system. I haven't found any relation to working with any specific application – it seems to happen at random while using any application. And as I said, it affects the entire system and all applications once it happens.
I've also tried this solution (posted elsewhere), but with no luck:
Restart Lion, and Before you hear the chime, hold down Cmd + R, to access Lion Recovery.
Click the Utilities item in the Menu Bar, then click Terminal.
In the Terminal window, type resetpassword and hit Return.
The password reset utility window launches, but you’re not going to reset the password. Instead, click on icon for your Mac’s hard drive at the top. From the dropdown below it, select the user account where you’re having issues.
At the bottom of the window, you’ll see an area labeled Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs. Click the Reset button there.
Does anyone know of any other solution to this problem? Or does anyone know the reason for it?
I should also mention that I experienced another problem recently, whereby my computer begun to sometimes (but not always!) show a progression bar at startup. This bar could take between 5-15 minutes to finish. This kept happening for maybe two weeks' time, until finally one day the computer wouldn't startup at all. It would come to show the dark grey Apple logo on the light grey background, and then suddenly shut off before reaching any further. I did a complete wipe out of the hard drive and re-install of the system, and since then haven't experienced the "progression bar"-problem anymore. I read somewhere that this problem could be a sign of harddrive failure or damage, but I still wonder if that is correct. Could the above mentioned "Document could not be saved"-problem also be related to a hard drive damage?
Thanks in advance for your assistance
Regards
Alex

Answer 1

The next time you have the problem, note the exact time: hour, minute, second.
If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.
Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Scroll back in the log to the time you noted above. Select any messages timestamped from then until the end of the episode, or until they start to repeat. Copy them to the Clipboard (command-C). Paste into a reply to this message (command-V).
When posting a log extract, be selective. In most cases, a few dozen lines are more than enough.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Important: Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.