replaced content

[Leslie Butler]

A large Word Document seems to have been replaced by a single blank page. I
had opened Word first, and was opening the Document from the ‘open’ icon. I
just clicked away as I usually do, not paying any attention to the dialogue
boxes. I did notice something about “replace . . ?†too late and so I don’t
know what I did wrong. Retracing my steps slowly didn’t give any clues.
I can’t now find the original content, yet in ‘My Documents’ the Document
shows as 23.5 kb. I tried closing the Document and using the recovery task
pane, but I only get the replacement blank Document. The Document size is
still shown as 23.5kb, even after closing and reopening the ‘My Documents’
folder, as well as the Document, which gives me hope that the content isn’t
wholly lost.
An advanced Search based on text was unsuccessful, there’s nothing in the
recycle bin, and a virus scan was clean. I'm using Word 2003 in Windows XP.
Suggestions, please?

 

[macropod]

Hello Leslie,

A file of 23.5kb is about what one might get for an empty document.
Unfortunately, that means there's nothing in it you can recover.

You might be able to recover something via some of the commercial
file-recovery utilities, but the more you do that involves files writing to
that drive (including Word's temporary files), the less chance you have -
and it doesn't start out very good when you've saved over the original
filename anyway.

Now's the time to retrieve your backup copy - if you have one.

Regards

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Closing the doc was your mistake. Until you did that, you could have used
Undo to get back where you started. And AutoRecovery works only if Word
hangs or the system crashes. But if you closed without saving (after the
accident), then the document should have been in the same condition in which
you opened it to begin with.