My mother was working on her dissertation for her master's degree and accidentally saved over the file. She hasn't lost everything, but has lost a particularly difficult piece of work she'd been working on the past couple of days. Is there any way for her to recover the previous version of the file?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. She's desperate.

Edited May 19, 200818 yr by Ragnarok

Was she making it with Microsoft Office? If so, look in the Options/Preferences, and see if there's the automatic save, usually set to every 15 minutes, with the check mark checked on it. If it is, then there should be the whole filepath to where the saved files can be restored from. Go to that file location and restore it from there. Good luck!

Yup, she's on MS Office. I don't remember being able to locate any AutoRecovery files, but I'll try looking again once she gets home (the files are in her laptop and she's taken it to work with her). I'm losing hope, though, since everywhere I look, people say the chances of recovering a document that's been written over are next to none, and my failed attempts at it indicate the same. Ah, well. :/ Thanks for the suggestion, though!

You're welcome. I had a co-worker do the same thing with a file that was made in Word 2003. I looked in the options/preferences tab (forget which it's name) and under the save feature the check mark was checked. All I had to do then was restore that version, as opposed to the version she had saved over it later that was almost blank. Like I said, it'll show the save path there, and it's buried pretty deep, so that, I'd guess, you can't write over it too easy, lol. The next thing I did was up the save to every 5 min. Let me know if you need any help.

Wow... here's something I didn't know about and it's just amazing! Just when I thought Word wouldn't surprise me!

Anyways, I decided to check if the last version of Word (2007) had that too, and I found it:

Thanks alot AJ !

Ragnarok, Hope your mum manages to get her document back!

BPanther

You're welcome, BP. And thanks for posting the screen shot -- wish I had thought of that! This is one of those things I found out by accident when my co-worker and boss were like "The DVD cataloguing file is all gone -- what do we do?" Oh, and I think it may also work with Excel, but I'm not sure...just in case anyone else needing help reads this thread.

I looked, but I wasn't able to recover the file. :/ There are only two AutoRecover files in the folder - one from today, after she saved over the file, and one from March. o.o But again, thanks for suggesting : )

oh, no, sorry to hear that, Ragnarok! That's awful to lose something you've worked on so hard. Maybe you can set up the autosave to save more frequently?

It's set to save every 10 minutes, oddly. o.o I don't get why there are only two autosave files in the folder. Ah, well...

The only other thing that I can see that'd be of any help would be to try and search for the name of the document.

Start > Search > (Name of Document) Also, C drive should be fine.

Make sure you check 'all files' and if there's a selection make sure 'hidden, system, and indexed files' are searched too. In Vista these options would come under 'Advanced Search'.

If the old file is in her laptop, it should be listed there.

Though, do tell your Mom to get a Pen Drive, also known as a USB drive I think. They're super useful, you can transfer files from computer to computer easily and you've got a back-up in case anything goes missing.

Good luck!

MsC

Edited May 20, 200818 yr by Ms.Croft

I've searched for it, but since she saved over the file as opposed to deleting it, it's nowhere to be found. Also, ironically, the whole thing happened because of the pen drive. She accidentally saved a slightly older version of the same file that was on the pen drive over the most recent version that was on her C: drive. I've even tried downloading file recovery programs such as Undelete (saving it on my iPod and running it from there to avoid the system writing over whatever remains of the file there were due to disk activity), but no such luck. She's been forced to accept the fact that she's going to do the lost pages over again. :/ Thanks anyway!

fortunatly, or rather unfortunately, I am an expertish in this area, so I understand your pain . i hate it when windows doesn't autosave properly. Did you try formating undelete or any other program so that it would search for autosave files? It could be that the computer did autosave, but the autosave file was deleted automatically after a period of time. Some of the undelete programs just seach for documents rather than all of those files like .wbk or .asd and such.

edit:

haha I so did not realize that this thread was started last year lolz. but if this helps anyone else, at least it wasn't such a waste lolz

Edited April 8, 200917 yr by Rika_Croft