Word Recovery Panel Disaster

[standenman]

My son called from college in a panic, having lost 5 pages of text in
a paper he is writing in Word. The PC froze, and he got the recovery
panel, and clicked on his document, feeling relief to find all the
text there. He then selected "merge into existing file" and found to
his horror that this resulted in his document now being sans 5 pages
of the recent typing. He was using a computer lab PC, and the search
capability of Windows Explorer is disabled. It is after hours, and no
one with the college IT is available. I advised him to walk away and
move on to other work that needs to be done, thinking if the data is
there now it will be there tomorrow. I do not know what the Word
autorecovery settings are on that PC/network. He is worried that due
to the "merge into existing file" choice in the recovery panel, that
there will be no autorecovery file available. My thought is that
there should be some autorecovery file there, even if it is only 4 of
the lost 5 pages. Thanks so much

Stan Denman

 

[Graham Mayor]

The missing pages are almost certainly lost. I doubt that your son would be
allowed to send the hard drive away for very expensive forensic data
recovery! The autorecovery function is volatile at best. It has already done
its job and the file will have been deleted. His only chance is to discuss
this with the college IT department to see what backup systems are in
place - if any.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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