document recovery weirdness

[Pamlwell]

Yesterday I was working on a document and left it for a while to eat dinner.
When I came back Word was closed. I opened my file up again and although I
(supposedly) have autorecovery running I could not recover much of my work
(titled Frankenstein). I looked for the autorecovery file as per the
"troubleshoot file recovery" help file. I can't find any file titled
"Autorecovery save of Frankenstein," but I do have a file in the same folder
called ~$ankenstein. Does anyone know what this file is? When I try to open
it, it is comprised of unreadable characters and word asks me to find a fomat
that makes it readable. Any help would be much appreciated, this is the
second time this has happened to me and I would like to keep it from
happening in the future.

 

[Jezebel]

The file you've found is just a lock file, to prevent the main file being
opened by two users at once. It contains no useful content. The backup
file, if it exists, will be called 'Backup of Frankenstein.wbk'.

 

[Pamlwell]

Ok, thanks. Why do you think it isn't auto saving? It is apparently set to
save autorecover info every 8 minutes. I don't really care that his
particular document was lost but I would like to keep this from happening in
the future.

 

[Graham Mayor]

There is no autosave function and autorecovery is somewhat hit and miss.
Whether it will restore your document depends on the circumstances of the
closure of Word. See http://www.gmayor.com/automatically_backup.htm

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

The situation you describe is what happens if you (a) have Automatic Update
configured to download and install updates unattended and (b) leave the
computer unattended with Word running and an unsaved document open. If a
restart is needed to complete the installation of the updates, Windows shuts
down Word without saving the open documents and without generating an error,
so the AutoRecovery backups are deleted just as if you had shut down Word
yourself and answered No when asked if you wanted to save the files. The
moral to this story is that you should (a) set Automatic Update to notify
rather than install (if you have the discretion to do this) and (b) never
leave the computer unattended with an unsaved document open.