Word 2003 file recovery

Post by **Massive Quasars** » Wed Oct 04, 2006 4:19 am

Straight to the point then.

Was working on a document I hadn't saved when Word up and crashed, a file recovery process of some sort was initiated and when Word restarted I was presented with a blank page.

Can I recover this document? The task pane has no list of recovered documents or a heading with that title. I suspect the file recovery process crashed after the program crashed because I never saw the bar fill to completion (although it's possible it zoomed through while I wasn't paying attention, a remote possibility).

Post by **lars63** » Wed Oct 04, 2006 3:46 pm

Sounds like you have lost the document, I'm no expert on this stuff better wait for someone more qualified than me before you give up. Good luck!!

Post by **dzjepp** » Wed Oct 04, 2006 5:04 pm

Can you search for file (it's probably stored in a temp dir somewhere)?

You can use an app like this on it and it might recover stuff from it http://www.officerecovery.com/word/

Post by **Captain** » Wed Oct 04, 2006 6:30 pm

System restore doesn't recover documents, does it?

Post by **Tormentius** » Wed Oct 04, 2006 11:04 pm

Captain Mazda wrote:System restore doesn't recover documents, does it?

No.

MQ: Did you have any luck in searching for the file and dzjepp suggested?

Post by **Massive Quasars** » Thu Oct 05, 2006 10:46 am

Could make a relatively long post on all the things I've tried.

Exhausted standard Word help suggestions, tried a program which has a feature to recover word documents. Tried and failed to find an AutoRecovery version of the document (which I'm fairly sure existed at one point because it by default creates one every ten minutes and even if deleted it would still exist in some form, complete or otherwise, on HD).

I honestly believed with all the redundancies in place and such, that Word wouldn't lose a document like it's older versions would if unsaved. With daily scheduled defrags and other HD intensive scheduled activity the chances of it remaining intact or to any significant degree salvageable seem moderate to low and continually decreasing.

Putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, I had a fair bit out there but it's no loss I can't incur. That said, if you have any suggestions which I could apply in future near worst-case scenarios I'd like to hear them (save the obvious), might as well not let this thread go to waste.

Post by **Tormentius** » Thu Oct 05, 2006 4:31 pm

You always want to save your document as soon as possible so that the auto-save feature can do it's job

Post by **+JuggerNaut+** » Thu Oct 05, 2006 4:32 pm

sounds like auto-save needs to be bumped down to 1.

Post by **Tormentius** » Thu Oct 05, 2006 5:47 pm

riddla wrote:auto-save is flaky while the doc exists only in ram

:icon14:

Post by **Massive Quasars** » Thu Oct 05, 2006 9:06 pm

riddla wrote:make it a practive to save the blank doc to disk before you ever start typing. auto-save is flaky while the doc exists only in ram

Save the obvious, i.e. saving the document, the flakiness of auto-save for unsaved documents is news to me.

If there's a feature which auto-formally saves a document and then proceeds to auto-save periodically after that, I'd be interested. Otherwise I'll just have to make it habit to save right when I begin a document.