How do I recover old data in a Word doc?

[Guest]

I have typed a letter in Word, saved it and closed it.
Next day opened the letter and changed it. Saved it under the same name and
closed it again.

Now I am not so happy with version 2 and I want to go back to version 1
again. Is there a way to do this?
I know that there are programs to do this with. Can anyone help me?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

If you have "Automatically create backup copy" checked on the Save tab of
Tools | Options, then you'll find the previous version, in the same folder,
as "Backup of <filename>.wbk." You will need to change "Files of type" to
"All Files" to see this. If you don't have this option checked, now you see
why you should!

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

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all may benefit.

"Toney's internetverbinding"

 

[Guest]

Hi Suzanne,

Of course I didn't have the back up option checked.... From now on I will
hehe!
Tough lesson....

Thanks for the help!

 

[Graham Mayor]

Not unless you have a backup of the original.

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?VG9uZXkncyBpbnRlcm5ldHZlcmJpbmRpbmc=?=,

I have typed a letter in Word, saved it and closed it.
Next day opened the letter and changed it. Saved it under the same name and
closed it again.

Now I am not so happy with version 2 and I want to go back to version 1
again. Is there a way to do this?

No, that information is lost. Unless you've set up Word to save a back-up copy
(wbk file in the same folder as the original). Then the version before your
most recent save would be in that.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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[Guest]

In the future, you may want to save under File>Versions. This automatically
dates and times your document if you save the version. You can also add
comments for review at a later time.

This is an option if you anticipate changes to the document in the future.

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?S1RK?=,

In the future, you may want to save under File>Versions. This automatically
dates and times your document if you save the version. You can also add
comments for review at a later time.

In my experience, this is a very dangerous thing to do. The Versions feature is
a frequent source of document corruption and should rather be avoided...

Cindy Meister

 

[Guest]

Cindy,
Can you explain this as I frequently teach this feature to teachers and
students to show objective progress with written expression.
Thank you.
Karen

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?S1RK?=,

Can you explain this as I frequently teach this feature to teachers and
students to show objective progress with written expression.
Thank you.

Difficult to go into any more detail, really, but...

The Word binary file structure is not particularly robust. A lot of information is
saved "in the last paragraph mark"; you'll see this if you copy/paste everything
EXCEPT the last paragraph mark into a new document.

What this really means is, that a lot of information concerning how a document is
laid out and formatted isn't saved in the text flow, but at either end of the text
flow. Save a Word 2000-2003 file to HTML, or a Word 2003 document to XML then open
it in Notepad (or as a plain text file in Word) and take a look at it.

Now add some section breaks to the document and change headers/footers, margins,
etc. Take a look at the internal structures again, and you'll see that a lot of
information is stored "in the section breaks", as well.

Everything one adds to a document that falls into this massive data cache can
potnetially destabilize the file structure. It shouldn't happen, but experience
proves that, all too often, things "get mixed up". What, exactly, can cause things
to "get mixed up" is uncertain; Word occasionally seems to "hiccup" (might be a
glitch when writing to disk or the network, for example).

Since, when you save multiple versions in a document, you're saving a copy of the
entire document within the binary structure, as well as information concerning the
version, the potential for strucutural damage (and thus loss of the entire document)
increase accordingly. It's happened to me, and since introduction of this feature,
we've seen numerous posts in these newsgroups that support the theory. Not as many
as for the Master Document feature, but enough so that personally, I'd never
recommend it for an important file.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or reply in
the newsgroup and not by e-mail