desperatly need help in recovering lost ms word document

[nwriko]

hello here's what happened,
my son had just completed a whole research on ms word and saved it. he then proceeded in writing another one on the same document when finished he.. saved again but did not change the file name... he now has lost the first research (a few days of work). any advice anyone out there can give us.. apart for "don't do it again"?

please note that unfortunately, the “always make backup” option was not enabled.

thanks

 

[Makosuke]

Is this the series of events?

1) Work on "Filename.doc" for a long time, saving repeatedly. Close it.

2) Open a new Word document and save it as "Filename.doc", then click "OK" when asked if you want to replace the document with the same name.

If that's what happened... you're pretty much out of luck as far as I know. Your only hope would be to shut the computer down RIGHT NOW, then get a copy of FileSalvage (or a similar application like Data Rescue II) and use it to scan the drive in hopes that it can find remnants of the overwritten file. Hope is slim, though.

If you had just deleted the entire contents of the document from within Word and hit "save", there might be some hope that Word left a temp file or "extraneous" data within the file itself. If you have "allow fast saves" checked in the preferences, the file might still contain some, if not all, of the data, although I'm not sure if there's any good way to get to it.

If this is the case (and Undo doesn't help, of course), you might try Force-quitting Word (rather than a normal quit, so it doesn't have time to clean up any temp files or such), and hope that you can find the remaining temp file (it may automatically open it when you reopen Word, or it may be sitting in the same folder as the original document).

You may want to post in more detail what happened, but whatever you do, DON'T do anything to the computer--the more you use it, the more likely that data is to get overwritten.

 

[Sdashiki]

When I do this I hit command-z and keep pressin it, sometimes, especially in Adobe products, you can go all the way back to before you saved.

this all depends on the app, the amount of RAM, and some user settings for undo settings. i dont know much about Word on this respect, but it should have a healthy amount of undo.

might be too late, but it could work if its still open.

 

[nwriko]

desperatly need help in recovering lost ms word document

thank you so much for the quick answer.

he has already given up on recovery and have began the re-writing process.