Mac Word file went missing for no apparent reason-recovery tips?

[macthenewblack]

I weep as I write this

I created a document worked on it and saved it [Mac Office 20004 Word]. When searching for keywords in the document a few days later having forgotten its title, I was surprised to receive no returns despite some distinctive keywords. To cut a long story short I could only find this file by going to Project Gallery in Word and selecting 'within the last month' whereupon I found the file. After closing it down [mightily relieved as it is an important document] I found today that the file is no longer appearing in Project Gallery and although it is listed in File/Recent Files the link generates a message that the file cannot be found. I have been backing up with Time Machine to a 120 GB Maxtor drive and it isn't there either. If I filter by date last opened it doesn't find the file but does find another file that I had open at the same date and time. I didn't delete the file. Why might it have disappeared twice? Does anyone have any suggestions? I have tried searching Time Machine with finder and also used Terminal to make hidden files visible.

 

[macthenewblack]

The story had a happy ending but only thanks to a colleague who is an expert in Ubuntu who spent an hour digging into the file structure using a grep search command. The word document was eventually found 10 folders deep and the culprit was a programme that I was trialling which created a 'noticeboard' type mind map and allowed word documents to be created from within the programme. Although it appeared that this file was indexed by Word and saved in my documents, when opened from within the program, it saved into one of the program's application folders. The file was intact - just seen by Finder. It seems that Finder cannot look that deep?

Thanks for the advice though. I am sure that this will come in handy.