unrecoverable

[Guest]

I had several documents open from my flash drive and left my laptop
unattended. When I came back to them the next day, my laptop had restarted
itself (not hibernated) and since the flash drive was no longer in the USB,
the documents were lost. There is nothing to be recovered and no sign of
where they went. Normally, the auto save would have saved my changes every
10 minutes, but without the flash drive in, what happened?

 

[Jay Freedman]

What happened is that the changes you made to those documents are
gone, permanently and irretrievably. (I assume that you still have the
unaltered documents on the flash drive, so only the changes are lost.)

From Word's point of view, you made two irreversible mistakes. The
first was opening documents from removable media. Don't ever do that
-- copy the documents to a temporary location on the hard drive, work
on them there, and copy them back to removable media only when Word is
closed.

The second, and worse, mistake was removing the flash drive from the
socket while documents on it were still open. That by itself could
easily be enough to corrupt the documents beyond repair. The reboot of
the system was just the icing on the cake.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
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[JoAnn Paules [MVP]]

You should never work on a file that's on some sort of removable media. I
don't understand how your files could be gone. Corrupted, yes, but not
completely gone.

--

JoAnn Paules
MVP Microsoft [Publisher]

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