Data Recovery

[Guest]

I was at the end of a very important document, saving it all the way through
periodically, when the system shut down and restarted for no reason. I went
back into the document and it will not open, says it is in unsupported
format. What does that mean exactly? Does anyone know how I can recover
this file, or if it is in a backup somewhere on the system where these files
go when shutdown occurs?

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I was at the end of a very important document, saving it all the way
through periodically, when the system shut down and restarted for no
reason. I went back into the document and it will not open, says it
is in unsupported format. What does that mean exactly?

Probably that the document is corrupted and is no longer usable.

Does anyone
know how I can recover this file, or if it is in a backup somewhere
on the system where these files go when shutdown occurs?

Unless you've explicitly backed it up, whether it's in a backup anywhere
depends on what program you were using to create that file, and perhaps what
options you had enabled.

Assuming that this is a word processing document, you might try reading the
file as a txt file in Notepad or Wordpad. You'd lose all the formatting, but
it's possible that you might be able to find some or all of your text within
it.

 

[Richard Urban]

If you were saving the file regularly, as you worked on it, then you should
be able to open the last saved version of the file. You should only lose
what was in the computer's RAM, and was not saved.

What program were you using to create this document? A computer shutting
down unexpectedly should not cause any corruption in files that have already
been saved - unless there was physical disk damage caused by the shutdown
(unlikely unless the shutdown was caused by a bolt of lightning).

--
Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!