accidental code change in document -- can I recover the info??

[lindygirl]

I've been using a flash drive to save/transport/work on a document from both
my home and work computers. Somehow over the weekend, my first page of text
from an important document got converted into boxes/weird symbols. The
"mess" stops mid-sentence, reverting back into the document text. I have no
idea why this happened; the only thing I can think of is that the flash drive
may not have been secure in the USB port during an autosave (I sometimes have
to push it back in). The computer guys at my office say the text is
unrecoverable, and that it is a code change, not a font change (what I
originally thought). What do you all think? Has anybody out there
encountered/fixed a similar problem? Thanks in advance for any advice. And
oh yeah -- I'm using Word 2002 at work (XP) and Word 2003 (XP) at home. All
the rest of the text switches flawlessly between the differing versions.

Thanks ~~ Kim

 

[Cindy Meister]

Hi Kim

I have to concur with the IT folks at your office. This does sound very much
as if there were problems during data transmission, which screwed up the
binary structures in the file.

Generally, it's always been a bad idea to work with Word files on removable
media. (Even bad network or email connections are a hazard. Word's internal
file structures are fragile, and there's little in the way of safeguards or
redundancy.) The chances are just too great that something like this will
happen. It's much better to copy to the local drive, work with that, then use
Windows Explorer to copy the file to the removable media. This also gives you
a backup, in case something would go wrong.

I don't think there's any way you can recover the "garbled" information, if
you don't have a backup anywhere.

-- Cindy