Autosave .asd files present but not viewable

[Gupta A.]

Very randomly and suddenly my autorecover feature stopped working. This is a
major blow to me as the power leaves from my home often. I'm in the habit of
just letting autorecover catch it for me, reading through these forums that
seems like a bad idea. I would however still like to be able to reactivate my
autosave. My autosave is set to saving every 1 minute. I allow background
saves. I ran several tests where I forced reset or shut the power of off my
mains after waiting 5-10 minutes (More than enough time for a 1 minute
autorecover) but the file recovery system didn't show. I then navigated to
the foler where autorecovery information is stored and found .asd files
relating to the word documents I'd done the experiments on. I could now
however open these .asd documents through microsoft word, and microsoft word
would not display the classic auto recover files at the startup of microsoft
word. I doubt theres some ghost option i clicked...but if there is then
please tell me. I tried to restore all settings to default...but apparentley
you can't do that in microsoft word...which was useful... Thanks for any help.

 

[Graham Mayor]

If you rely on autorecover, you are going to be very disappointed. Buy
yourself an uninterruptible power supply then if you get a power outage you
can drop to 'hibernate' mode and not lose anything. Such devices are
essential where the power supply is unreliable (here too). Shutting off the
mains while software is running is not something you should undertake by
choice. It can corrupt the hard drive -0 and certainly leaves a load of
dross behind. Always close Windows normally. In the meantime, see
http://www.gmayor.com/what_to_do_when_word_crashes.htm then
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/ProbsOpeningWord.htm

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I'll second Graham's suggestion (which I was also going to make) that you
get a UPS. We don't often lose power for any length of time here, but with a
lot of new home construction going on in the area, we get occasional
"blinks," which, without a UPS, are far more annoying than extensive outages
but hardly noticeable with a UPS.

That said, there is definitely something wrong if AutoRecovery backups that
exist are not being presented on startup. You don't say what version of Word
you have, but the KB article "How Word creates and recovers the AutoRecover
files" (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=107686) covers all versions.

KB316950, "How to recover a lost file in Word 2000," suggests that you can
open .asd files directly in that version. It also states: "If Word does not
open the AutoRecover file at startup, the file may be damaged. If you find
an AutoRecover file that does not automatically open, skip to the 'How to
Troubleshoot Damaged Documents' section of this article for additional
information about how to recover information from the file."