Document's old versions are missing!!!

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Guest

Hi,

I've been saving versions of a file for months now and had piled up quite a
few (by saving them automatically & by hand). Until somepoint in the last 2
days... when all of my old versions suddenly DISAPPEARED! I'm pretty sure
that I didn't change any settings and I'm certain that I didn't ask word to
delete them all. So where the heck did they go and how do I get them back??

The same thing happened in all the other documents that I saved versions of
(note: they all use the same template).

So, what went wrong??
HELP!!
 
Assuming you have been using File>Versions, I'm afraid this is a very
well-known dis-feature of Word... and you are one of its victims :( See the
quote below which summs it up rather concisely. I doubt there is anything
you can do to recover the lost material, but perhaps someone else can offer
a suggestion... I've never had any success in doing so.

Why Versions should be avoided
If you use Versions (File + Versions) to store multiple versions of a
document within a single file, then it will only be a matter of time before
your document corrupts and you lose all your work. Avoid this feature like
the plague - and like Fast Save and Master Documents, which are similarly
broken - unless the document is of no importance to you. Taking backups
won't necessarily help, because the corruption may creep up on you
gradually, and by the time you realise you have a corruption you may have to
go back to a very old file to get a clean document.
 
Damnit.

So then, other than MANUALLY using "Save As" to save each day's version
under a new name (like 'Document 07-04-30'), what are my options?? How do I
keep track of previous versions of an important & often-changed document??
And I'm not just talking "Track Changes" or "Backup" - I want to be able to
pull up a copy of the document as it looked yesterday or 3wks ago. What are
my options then??

I had EXACTLY the same problem in Excel a few months ago (but with much
worse repercussions). I even spent a few days trying to write my own VBA code
to automatically save a copy of each newly opened or closed workbook (with
new a date-specific name) into an archive folder in "My Documents".
Unfortunately I ran into a bunch of really annoying problems and just gave up
on the whole thing. Am thinking about just buying a copy of ComplyXL to do
the archiving for me. But that won't solve the problem in Word.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh! Why isn't there a way to safely & reliably archive past
versions of word (& excel) files?? I'd gladly stick to a maximum number of
age of archived versions if that's what it'd take to get this tool applied to
those programs. I just want to be able to access old versions of certain key
files.

Does anyone here know how I can retrieve the old versions of my file (in
Word)?? O do you have a pre-written code to archive selected files that you'd
be willing to share with me?? HELP (again)!!

ps: Thanks CyberTaz - I appreciate your help, even if you had to be the
bearer of bad news :)
 
Hi Fern,

To help with this issue (for folks moving to Office 2007) there is a MS Office Version Extraction Tool (VET) that can extract old
versioned files into separate ones, but it's not all that easy to use, it gets the name of the documents from a list created by a
prescan by the Office 2007 Migration Planning Manager (OMPM)
http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/42a75e09-a6e1-4c0f-b77a-dcfa5b6f11c51033.mspx

If you have saved a file back to the same name that had the versioned items in it, they may or may not have been removed by that
save in pre-2007 versions. In Word 2007 if you open a versioned file you get no warning that the versions are going to be gone
until you get ready to save (i.e. it doesn't tell you on opening the document), so the 'late warning' can cause a bit of panic as
well.

As CyberTaz pointed out, the versioning feature is one that would often lead to corrupt files, in part due to the complexity of the
Word .doc files, so it was a bit of strange timing from that aspect that they took out the feature when they switched to a different
file model, but basically they moved it to the MS Office Sharepoint product for Office 2007 as there were a lot of requests to be
able to store versions where collaboration/sharing were also part of what was needed (including document checkout/checkin) and
standalone versioned copies could be lost when saved to a server if later opened then saved by someone else who wasn't using the
versions feature. Sharepoint's workflow features are aimed at keeping independent and tracked versions of files.

==================
Damnit.

So then, other than MANUALLY using "Save As" to save each day's version
under a new name (like 'Document 07-04-30'), what are my options?? How do I
keep track of previous versions of an important & often-changed document??
And I'm not just talking "Track Changes" or "Backup" - I want to be able to
pull up a copy of the document as it looked yesterday or 3wks ago. What are
my options then??

I had EXACTLY the same problem in Excel a few months ago (but with much
worse repercussions). I even spent a few days trying to write my own VBA code
to automatically save a copy of each newly opened or closed workbook (with
new a date-specific name) into an archive folder in "My Documents".
Unfortunately I ran into a bunch of really annoying problems and just gave up
on the whole thing. Am thinking about just buying a copy of ComplyXL to do
the archiving for me. But that won't solve the problem in Word.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh! Why isn't there a way to safely & reliably archive past
versions of word (& excel) files?? I'd gladly stick to a maximum number of
age of archived versions if that's what it'd take to get this tool applied to
those programs. I just want to be able to access old versions of certain key
files.

Does anyone here know how I can retrieve the old versions of my file (in
Word)?? O do you have a pre-written code to archive selected files that you'd
be willing to share with me?? HELP (again)!!

ps: Thanks CyberTaz - I appreciate your help, even if you had to be the
bearer of bad news :) <<
--

Bob Buckland ?:-)
MS Office System Products MVP

*Courtesy is not expensive and can pay big dividends*
 
Thanks guys.

I used the code that Suzanne suggested (thanks for the link!!) to built
myself a pretty good (IMHO) working code. It copied a new time/date-stamped
image of the open file to an archive folder using AutoClose() and also let me
save the current version to the archive, even if I didn't want to close the
file quite yet. That all worked great but, since I'd also wanted to have the
archiving available to ANY file (if I chose to apply it), I put the coding
into my Normal.dot template & added some lines to check whether a given file
had had archiving enabled - if not, the file SHOULD have opened & closed as
usual - but if so, then it should have let me save to the archive at any
point while the file was open.

Anyway, it turns out that I made a big mistake somewhere along the way and
so now Word won't let me open documents (or the program itself!) using that
version of the Normal template. When I deleted Normal.dot & let Word apply
its own new/blank template, everything works perfectly. Similarly, when a
slightly different (less fussy, fewer parts) version of the template was used
with another document, that opened perfectly. But then again, that macro
really only works when the earlier version of Normal was operating in the
background.
Very odd, because both templates & macros were working great last night -
but then again, I was only opening & closing the documents, not the Word
program itself - so maybe that's where my problem crept in.

And what's SO frustrating is that I can't get access to the archiving code
(in Normal.dot) to debug it or at least to cut/copy all that code out so I
can keep all of the template's other settings (menu buttons, customisations,
etc). Any ideas for how I can access the macros without actually STARTING (or
having Word scan through) the macros?

Anyway, I figured I'd post my coding problem (& my inability to open Word)
to the 'Programming' discussion group to see if they know where I went wrong
or how to fix it (I'll cross-post links to each thread so no one gets
confused). I'd imagine that the programmers tend to concentrate over there
and I wouldn't want to keep bothering you guys with this topic now that it's
shifted away from my original non-coding question. But don't get me wrong, if
you know how I could fix this, then PLEASE let me know!!!

And thanks so much - you really did help me a lot (even if I've now hit a
snag of my own design). Thanks again!!
 

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