HELP Recover Lost/Corrupted File (WinXP/Word 2000)

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Please Help! A partner in our company has been working on a document since 3 am this morning. He was on a dialup connection to our server for email. He had Word open and was working on a document. For some reason the data link caused a hiccup on his groupwise email. He closed groupwise. Then he saved and closed his word doc. Then he rebooted. When he opened Word and his document, an older version of the doc appeared. Things I had him do: Windows Explorer search for all files modified yesterday & today. Still only came up with the old version. Check in his autorecover folder. Still only old version. Any other suggestions?

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He could look in his Temp folder for a file of approximately the right size. Rename to .doc and see if it can be opened in Word.

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Thanks so much for your suggestions. We’ve tried those with no luck. He’s just had to recreate the 7 hrs of work he put into the document.

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Just in case… if the document save time matches the time it was supposed to have been saved… could he have been typing with tracked changes on, but opened the document with revisions not showing?

Added: Reading your post more carefully, that doesn’t sound like the answer.

Was he editing an attachment? Does GroupWise work like Outlook when you edit an attachment: you have the choice to save the changes back into a message or not? If you say no, bad things happen. But Outlook uses a subfolder of IE’s cache for its attachments, and if GroupWise is similar, you might check around in there, going by file timestamps.

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He was not editing an attachment. He had GroupWise open over the dialup but he wasn’t working in it. He was working in Word. The dialup line took a hit and Groupwise froze so he saved the file and closed normally out of Word so he could reboot. The only thing I can think of is that maybe he only thought he saved file but was really tired and said no.

The other thing people have a hard time understanding is the 10 minute backup. As I understand it, that is saved to a tmp file in memory and is only written to the disk if the computer goes down abnormally? If the file is saved and Word is closed normally, that tmp file goes away.

And if we configure the Save options to create a backup to disk for each save, then the file size gets pretty large. Is my thinking correct?

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Word doesn’t really create backups. There are two sets of temporary files (at least):

• At certain user-defined intervals, it creates an “AutoRecovery Save” file with a .ASD extension in the folder designated under Tools>Options…>File Locations. However, it is my understanding that this only occurs if the user has not saved for that interval of time: if the user saves frequently, Word never bothers to create the ASD file. As you say, when the user exits Word normally, Word cleans up (deletes) the ASD files; they really are only there in case of a crash.
• Word does create lots of .TMP files; you may find one for each save! These, too, should be cleaned up if Word is shut down normally. Sometimes, if the user used Save As and saved into a different folder, Word loses track of .TMP files in the original folder. At least this was true in Word 97.
  [/list]You can configure Word to make actual backups. I think I posted a macro once that does that, and I know I definitely posted one that creates a new file every time you save, using the time (I think) to make the file name unique. Both require installing a macro to override Word’s normal FileSave behavior.

  Word does have its own “versions” feature, in which a single file can store multiple versions of a document, but I’ve never heard anyone recommend it.

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There is a back up option in word
Tools->Options->Save->Always Create backup copy
It makes a file called “Backup of originaldocumentname” usually in the same directory as the original document. It does not provide complete security; it is overwritten when you re-open the original file.

Did the user have Tools->Options->Save->Allow Fast Saves on? This is a known cause of documents vanishing.
Regards,

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Is the “Backup of…” always the immediately previous save, or is it the original from the time you opened it? Neither really addresses the problem of losing edits, but either might be useful in case one were to really trash up the document in editing.

I’ve heard of “fast saves” resulting in corruption, so I agree that they are better turned off.

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I am pretty sure that each time you save it renames the previous version to Backup of…

StuartR

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