Recovering a word doc URGENT

pontovic

Hi

My friend was using the family computer and he opened a word doc from his hotmail account using either firefox or internet explorer, he isnt sure which one. He opened it ( he didnt save it to disk ) and worked on it for the afternoon, saving periodically. He just saved as far as I know he didn't save-as.

He then closed the file and now we can't find it anywhere. Could any of you shed any light on how we could recover the file please ?

Any help well appreciated

ps: I did a search in windows specifying *.doc, basically trying to find every file on the computer that was a word doc and we didnt find our doc.

Thaks for the help.

**Timbuk2**

Hmm, tough one.

I was going to say Temp Internet files but a search for *.doc should have got that if it was there. Maybe it went away. AFAIK there is no way to get this back if it has deleted from temp internet files

Maybe you could get one of those programs that try to recover deleted files.

NOTE: To do this, don't save anything else. When a file is deleted, it doesn't actually delete, it just makes the space that the document was taking up avaible to be overwritten. If you save something, it will overwrite that space (that you could say is 'For Sale'). So you have a much better chance of getting you file back if you don't save anything else on the computer

Good luck

pontovic

Thanks for the reply, but I think at this stage it's gone. Computers are ****

SickBoy

It's a long shot but you could try that same search again but this time click on 'More advanced options' and tick 'Search hidden files and folders' as it's not ticked by default. It might work..

pontovic

I tried that yesterday and found the files but none of the changes he made had been registered in it. It was as if he had just opened it from his email and done nothing to it. He claimed he saved it on a regular basis, so it must have been saving somewhere. Thanks for the help anyhow

irlrobins

if he opened it up from his email it was prob saved in the cache folder of whatever browser he was using.

I'm not 100% certain that saves to such a file would actually save.

In future, always save the attachment to a folder, rather than just opening it and trying to edit it.

hope the document changes weren't too critical!

mordeith

Is it possible that the saves were made directly to the attachment? I know that's what happens with Outlook. Maybe it's not the same thing with Hotmail but its probaly worth just downloading the attached .doc ffom the original email and see, if by any chance, it saved the changes.

Oriel

Right,
Firstly, he did save it to disk. Once you open it, the first time you save it, it will ask you were you want to save it. I think the default will be my documents.
Secondly, it might not have been a .doc. It might have been a .rft or a .txt. Search for all of those.
Thirdly, it should be in the "recently documents" list in the file menu of MS Word.

S.

Oriel

Alternatively, search though all the files in the computer (by typing " *.* " in the search) and sort them by date created/modifed. Then look to the time of the first or last saved and you'll be able to find it.
You cannot save "directly to an attachment". You need to save a copy on the local hard drive. So unless it has been deleted, it is there somewhere.
All save-as does is saves a different copy of the file where you can use a new name.

pontovic wrote:

Computers are ****

Computers aren't ****, people are.

X-SL

google desktop to the rescue

**Timbuk2**

good post sinecura

Forgot about .rtf files. It would hardly be a text file, seen as Notepad would be the default for opening .txt files, but it may well be an .rtf file

Also, if you know the name of the attachment (eg joke.rtf) try searching for joke, and it will get everything that has joke in the filename, so you might have a chance there