How to recover deleted text in Word from saved and closed file?

B

Ben

I made a mistake - deleted an important text from a document, saved and
closed it. Now I need the deleted text back. Is there any tool to get that
text? Thank you.
 
J

Jay Freedman

I made a mistake - deleted an important text from a document, saved and
closed it. Now I need the deleted text back. Is there any tool to get that
text? Thank you.

Hi Ben,

The answer is "probably not". The rest of this reply is mostly about
measures you can take beforehand, so you won't be stuck if this
happens again.

You could try the program Recover My Files
(http://www.recovermyfiles.com). It's possible that the new version of
the document was saved to a different group of sectors on the disk
than was occupied by the previous version. In the file table, the old
sectors would be marked as available, and any further disk activity
may or may not overwrite them. If you're lucky, they're still intact
and could be recovered.

There's an option in Tools > Options > Save to "Always create backup
copy". If this is checked, a copy of the previous version of the
document will be in the same folder with a name like "Backup of
XYZ.wbk". If it isn't checked, do it now. See
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/AutomaticSave.htm for more
details.

If you had a daily or weekly backup schedule, you'd stand a chance of
having the previous version there.

If you have a printed copy of the previous version, it could be
scanned and OCRed to retrieve the text.
 

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