Oh my God-just lost the important file ever

[Kefalo]

It's my first time here and I am desperate. I am writing an e-book and what just happened to me is unbelievable. It has never happened to me before, nor have I heard of it happening to anybody.

I have been writing the whole day and have finished a couple of hours ago, saved and closed the document. And when I tried to start the document, it opened a copy that was 15 days old. Yes, that's right, not the copy from a couple of hours ago, not the copy from this morning, but a two weeks old copy. The only thing that is stopping me from killing myself at the moment is the fact that I backed it up on google docs this morning. But still, 12 hours of hard work wasted. And yes, I had autosave on the whole time.

I tried a free program called PC Inspector file recovery but no results.

I am restless and going mad. Please help.

[Hb_Kai]

Try Recuva. It should do the job for you. As long as you haven't recently used the memory on your hard drive else it may be corrupted.

[Dencandy]

Also, as an extra safety measure, use a USB drive to drag and copy the document to every hour or so. That's what I do. I had a similar experience some time ago but fortunately had the USB back-up with the latest version. Have you tried using Windows search to look for the document? Eventually, using search, I found the original up-date-date document in another location on the hard disk - goodness knows how it got saved in the wrong location.

[Kefalo]

Also, as an extra safety measure, use a USB drive to drag and copy the document to every hour or so. That's what I do. I had a similar experience some time ago but fortunately had the USB back-up with the latest version. Have you tried using Windows search to look for the document? Eventually, using search, I found the original up-date-date document in another location on the hard disk - goodness knows how it got saved in the wrong location.

You might not believe this, because it sounds too unbelievable. But until yesterday, I did not back up any of my docs, something made me back it up on google docs yesterday morning. I worked the whole day and then I saved the doc and tried to back it up again on google. I got the message that it's to big to back it up (it's an e-book and has some pictures), then...I did what you suggested, stuck an usb and dragged it to it. But guess what, when I tried to start it, it was the same 15 days old document. So, something must have gone wrong when saving the file.

Then, I did a search on the name of the doc- no luck...just the "new" old one...then I remembered some words that I used when writing yesterday that were not in the old document such as 'umcka' and searched for the words within the text of the document, just in case I accidentally saved it by other name (I've been sleeping for 3-4 hours for days so I doubted myself), and...NADA!

Used the pc investigator (which is BS btw), used recuva that was kindly suggested here which I quite like but again - no success...

But anyway, the day was saved by the fact that I received my first sale of my other e-book yesterday evening after this whole mess.

One last thing to bring me some closure-"How can this happen?" How? How can I find myself with a 15 days old document if I was working on this every day, autosaving it, saving it at the end of the day and shutting down the computer....just need to know "HOW?"

thanks

[-pops-]

I have 2nd Copy running all the time.

http://www.centered.com/

[Dencandy]

One last thing to bring me some closure-"How can this happen?" How? How can I find myself with a 15 days old document if I was working on this every day, autosaving it, saving it at the end of the day and shutting down the computer....just need to know "HOW?"

thanks

How can this happen? you ask. For some reason when you were working on the document, the additional work wasn't being written to the original data base or didn't get written to the hard disk when you shut down. I don't know how it could have happened in your case, though it can happen if you are working directly on a document stored on external media such us a USB stick, CD, floppy, or even a cloud data base. Is it possible you were working directly on the USB copy rather than the version on your computer? If you then shut down without properly disconnecting the device or utility your work will not be written to the device from your computer. Does that ring a bell?

I assume you were using MS Word for your document, is that right? If so, you might get some help from one of the Office support groups here: OFFICE

Have you tried examining the Google Docs file to see if it's there (sometime they get saved even though the utility tells you it wasn't saved)? Next time break a large document into smaller parts to save it on Google Docs, but do your own back-up as well.

There's one last long-shot you could try. If you are using Windows, nearly every thing you do on the computer gets temporarily stored in the Windows paging file on the hard disk until it gets over-written or unless you deliberately delete it. A copy of your document might still be there. It's called pagefile.sys and there's various utilities available to find it. I've never done this myself but there's a link about examining the page file here: FORENSICFOCUS.

Don't rely on Word automaticly saving documents for you. Save manually yourself every few minutes. As well as making a copy of the actual document onto a USB stick when I've finished, I also always make a copy of the larger file of which it is a part.

-pops- suggestion above also looks very useful.

We all live and learn from these experiences.

Anyway, congratulations on getting your other e-book sold.

[helpima.com]

also check out the following link for recovering files from temp files.

http://www.amset.info/tips/office-recovery.asp

here is what you need from that page:

"Word

The default auto save time for word documents is 10 minutes. You can control this time in Options under the "Save" tab. The auto save files are placed in one of the following two locations, which is where you should look to recover the data.

"C:\ Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft\Word".

"C:\ Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Temp"

When you have found a file that looks like it might contain data, you may want to open it in notepad instead of trying to get Word to reassemble it. The easiest way to do this is to open Notepad from the start menu then drag and drop the file in to it. The file will then be opened so that you can view the contents.

If the document was open when the system failed (power failure or crash) then you could try just opening Word again (not the document, just Word itself from the start menu). Word will then try to recover the lost document."