Lost Changes to Attached Document, Vista

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We did some work on a document that was attached to an email in Windows Live Mail. Thinking that we had already saved it to the documents folder, we hit “cntrl s” and closed the document. When we realized what we had done, we opened the document on the email again in order to save it to the documents folder, but the changes were gone!

Is there any way to recover our lost changes? We have searched high and low to find the place where the attachments are stored, thinking it might have been saved there, but we cannot find where the attachment are stored.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

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We did some work on a document that was attached to an email in Windows Live Mail. Thinking that we had already saved it to the documents folder, we hit “cntrl s” and closed the document. When we realized what we had done, we opened the document on the email again in order to save it to the documents folder, but the changes were gone!

Is there any way to recover our lost changes? We have searched high and low to find the place where the attachments are stored, thinking it might have been saved there, but we cannot find where the attachment are stored.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Have you tried the Sent folder ??

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Have you tried the Sent folder ??

Nope. We didn’t send it to anyone – we just closed it in the email we received it with. But on your suggestion I did look in the sent items. I don’t see anything there other than emails that I’ve sent.

I assume that the attachments are stored as separate documents (separate from the emails that is) somewhere on the hard drive. They were in OE. And it used to be in OE on XP that if you went to save a document that came attached to an email, it would try to save it in that temporary folder (and WOULD save it there if you weren’t paying attention and change the destination folder to somewhere else). So I’m thinking those changes might be saved wherever the original attachment “lives” on the hard drive, with the same name with a (1) after it or something. Any hope of that?

Searches don’t turn up the original document anywhere – but obviously that one exists! And we can’t find any folder that appears to store the attachments.

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The file may be in a hidden or system folder, you need to show them from the options in Windows Explorer.

To help, open the attachment and do a “Save As” and see where it is going to be saved, this may tell you what folder you need to look in. Do NOT save it, cancel out of the save, this save may over write the one you are looking for unless you change the path of name.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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The file may be in a hidden or system folder, you need to show them from the options in Windows Explorer.

To help, open the attachment and do a “Save As” and see where it is going to be saved, this may tell you what folder you need to look in. Do NOT save it, cancel out of the save, this save may over write the one you are looking for unless you change the path of name.

I do have the “show hidden folders” checked.

And unfortunately I already tried the trick you suggest. It just tries to put it in the Documents folder! I also tried opening an attachment document and then, from that document, going to “open” to see what folder it would start in – that also starts in Documents. I tried this with attachments in several formats, not just Word. I am SURE that when I’ve done this suggestion in the past it has had the result that you suggests it will have – but perhaps I am remembering my XP computer, with which I parted company not all that long ago?

Still baffled.
By now we have rewritten the lost document, but now it just BUGS me and I want to find those files!

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As Dave says, it may be a hidden or system folder. Another possibility is a temp folder used by the program you were editing the file with. Follow Dave’s trick to locate the folder.

You might also check if the program has a Open Recent… feature, and check to see if it can be opened, with the edits intact, from there.

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As Dave says, it may be a hidden or system folder. Another possibility is a temp folder used by the program you were editing the file with. Follow Dave’s trick to locate the folder.

You might also check if the program has a Open Recent… feature, and check to see if it can be opened, with the edits intact, from there.

Regretfully, tried both those with no success. I’m mystified – not merely at what happened to my saves, I KNOW I goofed there, but where ARE those files kept in Vista???

Baffled.

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From here…..

“The file should be located in a folder somewhere in
C:Users(youraccount)AppDataLocalMicrosoftWin dowsTemporary Internet
FilesContent.IE5

Windows Explorer won’t let you navigate to this folder, but it will show the
Content.IE5 folder and subfolders, only if you manually enter the path into
the address bar.”

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From here…..

“The file should be located in a folder somewhere in
C:Users(youraccount)AppDataLocalMicrosoftWin dowsTemporary Internet
FilesContent.IE5

Windows Explorer won’t let you navigate to this folder, but it will show the
Content.IE5 folder and subfolders, only if you manually enter the path into
the address bar.”

(How unhelpful to make files you have to know the path to find!).
But, in any case, I navigated to that folder and it says it is empty. I doublechecked to be sure that I have “show hidden files and folders” checked, and I do. The only “users” on this computer are myself, Default, and Public. After trying the file path with my name, I tried it with both Default and Public. Public tells me that it won’t let me go there, and Default yields an empty folder just as my account does.

So it is still a mystery. Thanks for your efforts to solve this with me Doc Watson, but MS still apparently has us stumped.

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But, in any case, I navigated to that folder and it says it is empty. I doublechecked to be sure that I have “show hidden files and folders” checked, and I do.

Make sure you have “Hide protected operating system files” unchecked.

Joe

--Joe

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(How unhelpful to make files you have to know the path to find!).
But, in any case, I navigated to that folder and it says it is empty. I doublechecked to be sure that I have “show hidden files and folders” checked, and I do. The only “users” on this computer are myself, Default, and Public. After trying the file path with my name, I tried it with both Default and Public. Public tells me that it won’t let me go there, and Default yields an empty folder just as my account does.

So it is still a mystery. Thanks for your efforts to solve this with me Doc Watson, but MS still apparently has us stumped.

Take a look in the Recently Changed folder C:UsersusernameSearchesRecently Changed and see if that file is in there.

I found the information here.

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Take a look in the Recently Changed folder C:UsersusernameSearchesRecently Changed and see if that file is in there.

I found the information here.

Thanks for your dogged persistence in trying to solve this mystery!

Still no luck. I went to my user name and searches and recently changed and did not see the file. It is now about six days ago and I have changed a lot of files- but I had them sorted by date and did find the one that we recreated in vy documents right after we lost the one in question, so I know I was on the right day.

Just in case I was simply overlooking it, I opened a file on an email and made a change, hit “cntrl s” and closed it (without saving to my documents), then went to the recently saved folder again. It didn’t show up there. And I also noticed that the most recent thing it DOES show is from yesterday and it appears to show everything I remember changing yesterday. So I also went into a Word document that I created this morning and made a change, saved and closed it and went back to recently saved. It still shows nothing more recent than yesterday. So I restarted the computer – STILL nothing more recent than when I turned off the computer yesterday.

I also tried looking at recently saved under the other two users (Public and Default) and notice that there is no such folder for either of them, I suppose because even when I’m working in Public I’m still logged in as myself. But I checked anyway.

The post you link to is an interesting explanation of the recently saved folder. Thanks for that info.

But still no luck on where they hide the email attachment documents!

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I just re-read your original post and relaized that you are using Window Live Mail. This may make it impossible to recover the document because, unless I am mistaken, Live Mail is an internet based mai service and would not necessarily store any temporary file on your system.

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Windows Live Mail is the successor of Outlook Express, it’s a disk-based mail client, not a webmail client such as Hotmail or Gmail.

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Windows Live Mail is the successor of Outlook Express, it’s a disk-based mail client, not a webmail client such as Hotmail or Gmail.

I stand corrected. Thanks Hans.

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OK… I have to admit defeat on this one. I’m out of ideas and resources. I guess that there might not be a way to recover those changes and the only good thing to come out of this is new knowledge.

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I am with Doc here, it was either NOT saved or some protection software did NOT allow it to kept on exit of the browser.
Some protection programs will remove all internet temp files when the browser is closed. This would include the closing of Windows Live mail.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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