Recovering a Word document.

[Dave]

Hi all,

A friend was creating a four page Word document. He claims to have hit the
shift & S keys together to get a capital s. Unfortunately, it appears that
he may have hit the Control key & possibly missed the s key & hit a nearby
key. Whatever he did, it ended up that there was just a lower case s on his
screen and the other pages had disappeared.
Unfortunately, being quite computer illiterate, he paniced & when a message
came up on the screen asking if he wanted to save changes to his document he
hit "Yes", thereby wiping all the work he had done previously. I got onto
his pc using Netmeeting & tried restoring the system to an earlier time &
date to try to get the original document back. That didn't work.
Does anyone have any ideas as to how he can get his original doc back?

Thanks, Dave.

 

[Stace]

Hi all,

A friend was creating a four page Word document. He claims to have hit the
shift & S keys together to get a capital s. Unfortunately, it appears that
he may have hit the Control key & possibly missed the s key & hit a nearby
key. Whatever he did, it ended up that there was just a lower case s on
his screen and the other pages had disappeared.
Unfortunately, being quite computer illiterate, he paniced & when a
message came up on the screen asking if he wanted to save changes to his
document he hit "Yes", thereby wiping all the work he had done previously.
I got onto his pc using Netmeeting & tried restoring the system to an
earlier time & date to try to get the original document back. That didn't
work.
Does anyone have any ideas as to how he can get his original doc back?

Thanks, Dave.

If fast saves is enabled you might be able to see the old text by opening
the document in a Hex editor - a free one is available from here:
http://www.memecode.com/ihex.php

Stace.

 

[Dave]

Thanks "Stace",

Unfortonately "Fast Saves" was not enabled. I did however tick the box in
Tools, Options, Save, "Always create backup copy". Will this save future
documents every 10 minutes so that if it happens again he will be able to
get a recent copy of his document?

Thanks again, Dave.

 

[Stace]

Thanks "Stace",

Unfortonately "Fast Saves" was not enabled. I did however tick the box in
Tools, Options, Save, "Always create backup copy". Will this save future
documents every 10 minutes so that if it happens again he will be able to
get a recent copy of his document?

Thanks again, Dave.

<snip>

It won't save every 10 minutes. What it will do is create a backup copy of
the file with a .wkb extension each time the document is saved. The backup
copy is overwritten at each save.

For further reading on the Save options take a look here:
http://word.mvps.org/faqs/general/AutomaticSave.htm

Stace