In desperate need to help recovering deleted file in Word!

[abrandolph]

I was typing in Word last night when it crashed and quit on me... I hadn't saved the document AT ALL and I was only writing over a previously saved document. When I opened Word again, I (stupidly) thought that I had copy and pasted the correct information and therefore clicked "Don't Save," when the Autorecovered windows popped up.

I have not yet quit Word since opening it the second time, and have tried two shareware programs to recover deleted files and one of them actually found the paper (filename file.doc, size 24K, and it gives me a directory although the file is not there when I went to look in that directory). The problem is that with this shareware, I can only see the lost files, not recover them.

So it is obviously there somewhere, but while the file is crucial, I don't think it's worth $90 to register the shareware to recover it.

Is there a way, possibly through Unix?

Thank you so much if you can help!!!

 

[mkrishnan]

Open a terminal window, go to the directory that the program indicated, and type "ls -la" and tell us the results.

 

[abrandolph]

currently at work...

but I checked it this morning and it had (from what I recall) 3 autorecovered documents, none the one i'm looking for, one document that I could not open, but I don't think it's the correct one anyway, 2 dir's and that's about it. When I get home from work I can better answer this question.

Thanks

 

[abrandolph]

Terminal windows reads:

pcp0010259266pcs:~/documents/microsoft user data adambrandolph$ ls -a
. AutoRecovery save of PostGazett
.. Entourage Temp
.DS_Store Office X Identities
.FBCIndex Word Work File A_2158
.FBCLockFolder Word Work File A_2398
AutoRecovery save of Document7 Word Work File A_2878
AutoRecovery save of Normal

thanks for your help!!!

 

[mkrishnan]

Are any of those files on the big side? What you might be able to do is make copies of those files and put the .doc extension on the end of the copy, and try to open it in Word. In particular, the Autorecovery of Document7... one.

Good luck!

 

[abrandolph]

The documents

I've opened the documents with the ever-useful and ancient Pico and one or two of them are old old documents that I just never looked back at, but it's not the one I'm looking for.

I really want to get back to the one program that I used that found the file... even gave me the first 200 or so characters (so I know that that's the one), but I just can't download the entire thing without shelling out $90.

I'm debating about stopping my search, biting the bullet and starting from what I do have...

any thoughts?