I opened an attachment from my email. I thought I had saved it to my hard
drive but I didn't. I saved it to the email attachment. Where do those
files go? Can they be retrieved?
No, they can't be retrieved. When you open a document from an
attachment, Outlook (or other email program) creates a temporary
folder and a temporary copy of the document for Word to open. If you
edit the document and save, the edited version exists only in the
temporary folder. As soon as you close it, the email program deletes
the temporary folder -- and your changes go with it.
There are some undelete programs that claim to be able to recover
folders and files that have been deleted. Since I've never needed to
use one, I haven't made a note of their names, but Google should turn
up some candidates. Be aware that the more you use your computer, the
more likely it is that some other file will overwrite that disk space
and make the documents unusable.
So burn this advice in your memory: Never, ever, ever edit a document
that you opened from an attachment. Save the attachment as a real file
in a real folder first, and then open that copy.
--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
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