Vanity- HELP! My wife in Caribbean and lost an important Word file

[disraeligears]

My wife is in the caribbean and was working on a document all day in her f:\ flash drive, that had she saved it recently within the past few minutes, and sudenly it totally disappeard for no reason? and now it is not even on the flash drove nor on any c:\ drive nor in any retrieval any search or recovery method?

She's lost about 6 hours of work.

I'm in North Carolina and so can't help her. I'm no good at trying to help over the telephone; plus there are no phones; I'm worse trying to e-mail suggestions. My best with trying to find a lost file requires that I'm at the actual key board.

If any of my fellow Freepers has any ideas, please post and I'll cut and paste them in an e-mail to my wife.

Thank you, Disraeligears

[politicket]

What version of Word?

[1rudeboy]

bttt

[disraeligears]

microsoft office word 2003

[Cringing Negativism Network]

If she plugs the thumb drive back in, does the file show in the recycle bin?

[alice_in_bubbaland]

I’m not a computer genius by any stretch but, you said she saved her work to her flash drive? Try a reboot then insert the flash drive and it should come up.

[oh8eleven]

Some suggestions here ...

[Nat Turner]

download winhex on the main pc. Then install it, then run a search based on the name of the file or data in it. Chances are key portions of that file have be destroyed but you should be able to resurrect most of it, which you can cut and paste into a new file. Hope that helps

[disraeligears]

cringin and alice in bubbaland

I’ll forward on your suggetions

If anyone else has any ideas in addition to cringin’s and alice’s; it would be most appreciated

[politicket]

Here is a Microsoft Knowledge Base article that lists a number of things to try.

[disraeligears]

thanks guys... if she still can’t find it, she should just go out to the tiki hut and get a rum runner

appreciate it very much

disraeligears

[Concho]

Tell her to set her word to auto save. At least she wont loose but a few minutes.

[martin_fierro]

I'm no good at trying to help over the telephone; plus there are no phones

Then that works out well for everyone, dunnit.

[livius]

She may have thought she was saving to her thumb drive but actually have been saving to another directory on her laptop.

If she just tells Word to open a document and then mouses over the name of her document (which will be there if she saved it anywhere), that will bring up the path, which is the full location of the document (disk, directory, subdirectory, etc.). In any case, Word knows where it is, so she can just click on it to open it again, and then “save as” to her F drive (or whatever letter her thumb drive is on).

If she didn’t save it at all, then it won’t appear on the list in Word.

[IllumiNaughtyByNature]

plug thumb drive back in, open a new word doc and then click FILE, click the arrows at the bottomto open up all options in that dropdown and recent docs should show up at the bottom.

Hope that helps.

[ViLaLuz]

Put the thumb drive back in the computer. Go back into Word, > File on the menu bar > Recent Documents (at the bottom of the list). See if the file is listed and can be opened from Recent Documents.