How to rescue a big broken document after an electrical outage

[Emre Sevinc]

A friend of mine who was working on an MS Word document (more than 200
pages) had a problem when the electricity went out. After the power
came back and she tried to open the document MS Word said something
like that: Please be sure that the extension is .doc and try again.
However nothing changes no matter how much she tried (at least that's
what she said to me, she's just helpless).

I searched for something in Google and found a couple of programs like
DocRepair and advised my friend to try these. She said that she tried
but the programs were demo versions and they didn't help. One of them
didn't work at all and the other put lots of DEMO words in the
document and scrambled the text (simple Search/Replace was not
effective).

Can anybody help me with this? Maybe MS Word was taking some backups
in some folder so that my friend can rescue much of her work. She's in
desperate situation because the document is about her last book and
she didn't have any seperate backup. It is very important for her.

 

[joust in jest]

Do a Google search on "data recovery". Data recovery is expensive, so your
friend will have to weigh the value of her book against to cost (hundreds of
dollars to thousands of dollars) of retrieving it.

Explain to your friend that there are two types of people who always back up
their data:
1. Those who do so because they were told that it is a good idea to do
so.
2. Those who do so because they once lost a two-hundred page manuscript
and don't want to ever lose another one.

Also explain to your friend the value of a good UPS (I prefer APC) -- the
next time that the power goes out, your friend will have 5 to 15 minutes to
save her work and shut down the system gracefully.


steve

 

[Emre Sevinc]

Thanks for the advice.

Anybody who cares to provide a concrete solution? Somebody who is
experienced with MS Word and/or had similar problem and found a simple
solution?

 

[Norm Dresner]

Thanks for the advice.

Anybody who cares to provide a concrete solution? Somebody who is
experienced with MS Word and/or had similar problem and found a simple
solution?

The chances of success depend to a great deal on two things
1. How badly the contents of the hard disk were scrambled by the event
2. How much formatting was used in the document

IF .. If the document had very little formatting internally then bringing
the file into a text editor (not a word processor) like NOTEPAD could enable
your friend to grab large chunks of text intact. If the document is strewn
with formatting commands (or formatting changes -- same thing) then the
chances of getting any recognizable text go down in proportion to the amount
of extra stuff that WORD would have put into the body of the file.

It's worth a shot.

Norm

 

[Don MI]

A friend of mine who was working on an MS Word document (more than 200
pages) had a problem when the electricity went out. After the power
came back and she tried to open the document MS Word said something
like that: Please be sure that the extension is .doc and try again.
However nothing changes no matter how much she tried (at least that's
what she said to me, she's just helpless).

I searched for something in Google and found a couple of programs like
DocRepair and advised my friend to try these. She said that she tried
but the programs were demo versions and they didn't help. One of them
didn't work at all and the other put lots of DEMO words in the
document and scrambled the text (simple Search/Replace was not
effective).

Can anybody help me with this? Maybe MS Word was taking some backups
in some folder so that my friend can rescue much of her work. She's in
desperate situation because the document is about her last book and
she didn't have any seperate backup. It is very important for her.

If you friend is using a recent version of Word, she could try to recover
text from any file option. In the Word Open dialog box in the File of Type
{at bottom} drop down list, select Recover Text from any file option. This
option sticks. So after using it, she will need to go back and select the
normal File of Type setting the next time she opens a Word file.

Don