Recovering from crash

[Daniel Cohen]

Recently Word X (on OS 10.3.5) crashed on me, a considerable time after
my last Save. I tried to recover the unsaved file, but ran into
difficulties, and I was wondering what the best thing to fo was.

I have in the past found Word offering to open a version of the file,
but this didn't happen here.

Instead, I was able (with some effort) to find a file in a temporary
items folder that did contain the text. Howefver, when I tried to open
it in Word, I was not given the option of opening as a Word document,
instead I had a bunch of options including "text only" and "recover text
from any file". As far as I can remember, the second option gave some
text of a very odd kind that was unusable. And the first option gave the
text with a whole bunch of peculiar characters of some kind. It was
possible to use that option as a basis for re-writing text into the
original file, but it took a lot of clearing stuff out before it even
became readable.

Is there a beter way of getting a decent text back?

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Is there a beter way of getting a decent text back?

Probably not. But look for an autorecover document (by default in the
Documents folder - you can change the location in Preferences/File
Locations). If Word had detected an autorecover document there, though,
it should have opened it, so I'm not really hopeful.

I'd think that Recover Text from any file is your best bet, even if you
have to clean it up significantly.

Two lessons to take out of this:

First, save your file frequently - get used to using CMD-s every time
you pause for more than a moment.

Second, choose Preferences/Save and check "Always save backup copy".
This will allow you to recover most of your changes, even if the most
recent save gets corrupted.