Word crisis - Help!!!!

[David Edwards]

I'm in the US at the moment and my wife, in the UK, has
managed to erase almost all her university thesis from a
Word document which she then resaved before calling me.
She also closed Word down before calling me.

Is there any way that the earlier file version could be
restored?

She is absolutely distraught at the moment.

 

[Jay Freedman]

Hi David,

While I feel bad about your wife's problem, it seems she's done just
about everything she could do to make sure there's no way to recover.

The best possibility, of course, would be a backup copy of the file
stored somewhere. If the Tools > Options > Save dialog's "Always
create backup copy" option is checked, there will be a "Backup of
xyz.wbk" file in the same folder with the original, and it will
contain the document as it existed prior to the last save. A real
backup on a different drive would be ideal, but if she had that then
you wouldn't be asking the question.

When you trash a file and save it, you can still run multiple Undo
operations to get back to the previous state -- as long as you don't
close the file. That, obviously, will be helpful only for the next
time.

Word does make temporary files (see
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=211632) but most of them contain
only small bits of the document and are nearly impossible to
reassemble. Further, when you shut down Word, the temp files are
(usually) deleted automatically.

If there's a reasonably recent hardcopy printout, you can use a
scanner and optical character recognition software to turn it back
into a Word file. That may be your best option now.

 

[teflon]

Hello David!

There's one solution, albeit laborious--to recover the file from the hard
drive, a good Hexadecimal editor can be used. WinHex can find a deleted
file, assumed no other files have been written to the drive. Under Tools,
File Restore option gives one a choice of searching for the deleted
information by its partial filename or by a string characteristic to the
file. This operation saves what it finds to a new file, and from there ine
can copy and paste and edit the lost document into its original shape.

Another advice for saving information--performing intensional SaveAs under a
slightly different filename and into a different drive.
Good luck