Recovery of unnamed document

[Justin]

Hi Friends,

Yesterday, in a flurry of opening and closing XL
documents, I closed the program without naming the book1
document I had been working on (for 4 hours).

Yes, I know, I've learned my lesson, but is there any way
to recover the unnamed document? I have run searches
for "book1", searched for words I used in the
spreadsheet, and looked in the file menu for the last
open files, but to no avail. I have not yet turned off
or rebooted my computer, hoping this thing is still in a
temporary file.

My guess is that when the application closes, it cleans
up after itself, and deletes unnamed files.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[Dave Peterson]

If you've never saved it, I think it's lost.

But one final check (that I will fail, I fear):

If you're using xl2002 and you have autorecovery enabled, you may have a file
hanging around that wasn't deleted.

I use xl2002 and win98 and the folder that stores these files is names:
C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\Excel
the files themselves have an extension of .xar (eXcel AutoRecovery??).

If you find any, copy them to a nice folder and rename them to .xls.

Then open them and see if you got lucky.

(In my experience, the only time these files are kept alive after excel closes
is when excel/windows crashes--that's why I don't think there's too much hope.)

But 30 seconds of verifying might be worth it.

 

[Robert King]

This is more of a question rather than a solution - if an excel file
has never been saved but auto-recovery is enabled and excel has exited
normally (probably deleting the file), can the .xar file be recovered
by software such as undelete?

Rob.

 

[Dave Peterson]

Unencumbered by the thought process:

If your undelete software can recover deleted files (and the space on the
harddrive hasn't be overwritten), I would bet so.

But you may want to try a little test against a test workbook.

(I don't own undelete software, so I'm not 100% sure. I know I wouldn't bet the
house on it--but it might be worth trying if you lost a lot of work.)