UNSAVED Data

[lobarnes9988]

I was working on a document and I had to undo a lot of things to get
an original idea from the beginning of the paper and I accidently
exited out of the document with my final draft and DID NOT SAVE.
PLEASE contact me as soon as possible to see if I can look on my
harddrive for recovery! I would greatly appreciate it!

Lauren

 

[Elliott Roper]

I was working on a document and I had to undo a lot of things to get
an original idea from the beginning of the paper and I accidently
exited out of the document with my final draft and DID NOT SAVE.
PLEASE contact me as soon as possible to see if I can look on my
harddrive for recovery! I would greatly appreciate it!

If you have continued using the machine, there is little chance of
there being anything useful left on the drive. You might try
versiontracker.com for an undelete utility, but by the time you have it
installed on your machine, that activity will have overwritten your
data.
If the file were stored on a non-system disk that is lightly used, I'd
offer a 50% chance of getting 50% of it back. Otherwise you will have
learned a hard lesson the hard way.

Next time, keep doing lots of save-as as your document progresses.
Every time you get to an interesting point, do a Save-as with a new
file name. When I'm working in a create document way, I'll save-as with
a nice long name that describes what was interesting.
e.g. "Mouseless after undoing piece about changing system keyboard
shortcuts.doc"
(aside to Beth R "see! I'm working on it!")

There is absolutely no harm in having 100 or more versions of your
document with differing names as you work. I worked with about 10
others on a very large Word document for four years. I'm sure that we
had 100,000 versions of that thing by the time it was finished. We can
go back over all of them to revisit ideas we had discarded aeons ago.
But then, I hope we don't have to. 4 years is enough.
The other thing is backups. To guard against machine failure, as
opposed to short term brain malfunction, saving everything to another
device/computer every day or or few hours is a parallel good idea.

And don't forget to test your backup restore procedure. You don't want
to be doing that after your primary copy has fried.

 

[Clive Huggan]

If you have continued using the machine, there is little chance of
there being anything useful left on the drive. You might try
versiontracker.com for an undelete utility, but by the time you have it
installed on your machine, that activity will have overwritten your
data.
If the file were stored on a non-system disk that is lightly used, I'd
offer a 50% chance of getting 50% of it back. Otherwise you will have
learned a hard lesson the hard way.

Next time, keep doing lots of save-as as your document progresses.
Every time you get to an interesting point, do a Save-as with a new
file name. When I'm working in a create document way, I'll save-as with
a nice long name that describes what was interesting.
e.g. "Mouseless after undoing piece about changing system keyboard
shortcuts.doc"
(aside to Beth R "see! I'm working on it!")

There is absolutely no harm in having 100 or more versions of your
document with differing names as you work. I worked with about 10
others on a very large Word document for four years. I'm sure that we
had 100,000 versions of that thing by the time it was finished. We can
go back over all of them to revisit ideas we had discarded aeons ago.
But then, I hope we don't have to. 4 years is enough.
The other thing is backups. To guard against machine failure, as
opposed to short term brain malfunction, saving everything to another
device/computer every day or or few hours is a parallel good idea.

And don't forget to test your backup restore procedure. You don't want
to be doing that after your primary copy has fried.

For through-the-day backups, Martian Lifeboat is good. I just whack in a
memory stick that I've previously configured to check certain folders, and
it backs up in seconds. Probably good for more substantial backups, but I
use other software for that.

CH
===

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Lauren:

Sorry! When you restarted Word, all the temporary files from the previous
sessions are automatically deleted. There is nothing left to look for.

As others have said, you can try an undelete program, but it would bge far
quicker to re-type the document. An undelete utility will take several
hours (up to 80, depending on how large your hard disk is...) to recover all
of the files it can find.

You then have to open each one individually to see if it's the one you are
looking for. The temporary files have numeric names. Files with
human-readable names are probably "NOT" the one you are looking for. Word
keeps temporary data for a document in as many as 20 or 30 temporary files.
It can be a very lengthy process to find them all.

Sorry

I was working on a document and I had to undo a lot of things to get
an original idea from the beginning of the paper and I accidently
exited out of the document with my final draft and DID NOT SAVE.
PLEASE contact me as soon as possible to see if I can look on my
harddrive for recovery! I would greatly appreciate it!

Lauren

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Yeah, yeah. I'll believe it when I see it ;-).