Help My Grandad!!

  • Thread starter Thread starter redi_knight
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redi_knight

My poor grandfather has an enourmous problem. He has been
writing his memoirs of World War 2 on the laptop I gave
him and was upto about 50 pages when disaster strikes. He
deletes all his work and is left with 3 words

He phoned me up in a panic and unfortunately he had
already closed the document and pressed save!!! (so it is
saved as just the 3 words and not the 60,000 or so he has
written!!!

(To you and me it is obvious what he should have done,
but he is 81 and I think it is remarkable he even knows
how to turn a PC on, go into word, write and save his
work)

I havn't yet seen the PC but fear for the worst.

We do have a fairly recent copy saved but he has done a
lot since I last backed it up for him!

Is there any way that his latest work is recoverable?
Basically I would like to see a list of his recent saves
for that document and be able to revert to one by picking
the date and time.

I am sure I have seen programs for this but can't
remember and would be ever so grateful for the help.

I feel sooo sorry for the poor guy and he'll be really
upset if he can't get it back.

Many, many thanks to anyone who offers some advice on how
to get this work back
 
The chances of recovering anything are virtually nil. If he has saved a
recent version then file recovery software *may* be able to get that back,
but if he hasn't been saving regularly then he will have to start typing
again from the last backup :(

See http://www.gmayor.com/automatically_backup.htm for some suggestions to
help avoid this in future.

--
<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>><<>
Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>><<>
 
redi_knight said:
My poor grandfather has an enourmous problem. He has been
writing his memoirs of World War 2 on the laptop I gave
him and was upto about 50 pages when disaster strikes. He
deletes all his work and is left with 3 words

He phoned me up in a panic and unfortunately he had
already closed the document and pressed save!!! (so it is
saved as just the 3 words and not the 60,000 or so he has
written!!!

(To you and me it is obvious what he should have done,
but he is 81 and I think it is remarkable he even knows
how to turn a PC on, go into word, write and save his
work)

I havn't yet seen the PC but fear for the worst.

We do have a fairly recent copy saved but he has done a
lot since I last backed it up for him!

Is there any way that his latest work is recoverable?
Basically I would like to see a list of his recent saves
for that document and be able to revert to one by picking
the date and time.

I am sure I have seen programs for this but can't
remember and would be ever so grateful for the help.

I feel sooo sorry for the poor guy and he'll be really
upset if he can't get it back.

Many, many thanks to anyone who offers some advice on how
to get this work back
Click to expand...

I'll suppose your granddad opened word, closed it, opened, closed it
etc. Back in the old days, on Novell, they had a program called
Salvage. It saved my ass more than once. Basically, when I saved the a
file, it gets written to a new location and the previous copy has a flag
noting it is deleted. The deleted file becomes unused disk space,
available for new files to be written there. So Salvage would pull up
all of those deleted copies and I could recover them. I once went in
and Salvaged Test.Prg and had about 5 copies to select, one went back a
few months.

You might want to Google on deleted files in http://groups.google.com
and simply look for deleted software.

I doubt Word saves the file in the same location each time. The thing
is that you don't know if something will be saved/overwritten in that
same spot after the file has been deleted since that space is now
available for use. So you want to check on this as soon as possible.

You might want to find some of that undelete software and if there is a
contact, call them up and see if they've ever recovered from a problem
like you described.

Now if Word was never closed, then I'd say you are SOL.

I wouldn't know if your granddad is a fast typist. You might consider
getting him a voice recorder and a bunch of cassettes for it and let him
get his thoughts down via voice. THen let him give you what he has
spoken and transcribe them...as a gift...for his legacy. I remember too
there was voice recognition software...if they've improved it that might
be a nice gift for your granddad. Let him speak and let the computer do
the writing.
 
Thank you both very much for your replies.

Basically he had been hitting ctrl+S quite often and
indeed he would have done this shortly before he erased
everything.

If it is possible, as you were saying, that I could
access one of these previous saves then that would be
ideal. However if Word does overwrite any previous trace
of the file when you save over it then I fear he is
stuffed :(

But it is this that I need to know.
 
If he has "Automatically create backup copy" enabled, then the "Backup of
<filename>.wbk" file will be just what he needs (provided he doesn't do
anything untoward in the meantime). See
http://word.mvps.org/faqs/general/AutomaticSave.htm

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
If he has been saving regularly, then the prospects are much improved, but
you'll have to tell him to leave the machine alone until you have attempted
recovery using appropriate software.

--
<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>><<>
Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>><<>
 
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