disappearing word doc

[walter]

My wife spent hours compiling a letter in Word 2003.

And then it disappeared.

She sent it as an attachment to an e-mail but it arrived as a blank
document. The .doc shows 20kb but there is nothing in it.

The document has a file name and this file name shows up in Documents. But,
there is nothing in this document when I pull it up in Documents. She said
she saved the document regularly. It is not in the recycle bin. It has
disappeared into thin air. I did a search for the file name, no luck. It
only came up with the empty document.

I checked the "Save" options. It shows that the autosave it set for 1
minute.

I rebooted to see if the auto-saved file would show up. Nothing.

Where else can we look for this vaporized file?

Thank you

Walter
-
www.rationality.net

 

[Roger Mills]

My wife spent hours compiling a letter in Word 2003.

And then it disappeared.

She sent it as an attachment to an e-mail but it arrived as a blank
document. The .doc shows 20kb but there is nothing in it.

The document has a file name and this file name shows up in Documents.
But, there is nothing in this document when I pull it up in Documents.
She said she saved the document regularly. It is not in the recycle bin.
It has disappeared into thin air. I did a search for the file name, no
luck. It only came up with the empty document.

I checked the "Save" options. It shows that the autosave it set for 1
minute.

I rebooted to see if the auto-saved file would show up. Nothing.

Where else can we look for this vaporized file?

Thank you

Walter
-
www.rationality.net

From what you say, the file *is* there - it's just that it appears to
be empty. It could be genuinely empty if your wife had, for example,
pressed CTRL/A (intending to press SHIFT/A) followed by the space bar,
and then saved the file.

This would select everything and then replace all the selected text by a
single space. I would have thought that she would have noticed this
though before saving! ['Undo' (or CTRL/Z) is your friend in such cases -
but only in that session.]

Alternatively, it may have somehow got saved in a format which Word
doesn't display. I can't really think how that could happen, but I know
that one organisation sometimes sends me emails (not Word files) which
contains some duff HTML code which makes them appear empty. Try opening
the file in a text editor - such as Notepad - rather than Word. That
should show whether any of the original text *is* still there. [You'll
get a lot of hieroglyphics as well, but hopefully there will be some
readable text which you can copy into a new Word file].
--
Cheers,
Roger
____________
Please reply to Newsgroup. Whilst email address is valid, it is seldom
checked.

 

[Wolf K]

My wife spent hours compiling a letter in Word 2003.

And then it disappeared.

She sent it as an attachment to an e-mail but it arrived as a blank
document. The .doc shows 20kb but there is nothing in it.

The document has a file name and this file name shows up in Documents.
But, there is nothing in this document when I pull it up in Documents.
She said she saved the document regularly. It is not in the recycle bin.
It has disappeared into thin air. I did a search for the file name, no
luck. It only came up with the empty document.

I checked the "Save" options. It shows that the autosave it set for 1
minute.

I rebooted to see if the auto-saved file would show up. Nothing.

Where else can we look for this vaporized file?

Thank you

Walter
-
www.rationality.net

This may provide some clues:

https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/...-a-backup-copy-of-a-document-HA010121250.aspx

Good luck

 

[Big Steel]

My wife spent hours compiling a letter in Word 2003.

And then it disappeared.

She sent it as an attachment to an e-mail but it arrived as a blank
document. The .doc shows 20kb but there is nothing in it.

The document has a file name and this file name shows up in Documents.
But, there is nothing in this document when I pull it up in Documents.
She said she saved the document regularly. It is not in the recycle bin.
It has disappeared into thin air. I did a search for the file name, no
luck. It only came up with the empty document.

I checked the "Save" options. It shows that the autosave it set for 1
minute.

I rebooted to see if the auto-saved file would show up. Nothing.

Where else can we look for this vaporized file?

Somehow, your wife got burnt. I don't think she is going to get her work
back.

You should test the (save) of a test document. You should test the
auto-save of a document on program or system crash to see if it's there.

On Win 7, I have the ProgramData folder unhidden where I found the
Microsoft/Office folder talked about in the link. You may want unhide
(use Bing or Google on how to unhide the ProgramData folder on Vista or
Win 7) and see if any Office temp files are there that you might be able
to recover.

http://www.ehow.com/how_5217263_recover-autosaved-file.html

 

[GlowingBlueMist]

My wife spent hours compiling a letter in Word 2003.

And then it disappeared.

She sent it as an attachment to an e-mail but it arrived as a blank
document. The .doc shows 20kb but there is nothing in it.

The document has a file name and this file name shows up in Documents.
But, there is nothing in this document when I pull it up in Documents.
She said she saved the document regularly. It is not in the recycle bin.
It has disappeared into thin air. I did a search for the file name, no
luck. It only came up with the empty document.

I checked the "Save" options. It shows that the autosave it set for 1
minute.

I rebooted to see if the auto-saved file would show up. Nothing.

Where else can we look for this vaporized file?

Thank you

Walter
-
www.rationality.net

Depending on what email program she used there might be a copy of the
letter in the "sent" folder or what ever it's called in her email program.

 

[Paul]

My wife spent hours compiling a letter in Word 2003.

And then it disappeared.

She sent it as an attachment to an e-mail but it arrived as a blank
document. The .doc shows 20kb but there is nothing in it.

The document has a file name and this file name shows up in Documents.
But, there is nothing in this document when I pull it up in Documents.
She said she saved the document regularly. It is not in the recycle bin.
It has disappeared into thin air. I did a search for the file name, no
luck. It only came up with the empty document.

I checked the "Save" options. It shows that the autosave it set for 1
minute.

I rebooted to see if the auto-saved file would show up. Nothing.

Where else can we look for this vaporized file?

Thank you

Walter
-
www.rationality.net

I set the Indexing on Windows 7, to cover as much of the system
as possible (that's harder to do than you'd think - you have to
fight with the damn thing to achieve that). If you do a search
using the file window, and search based on some text known to
be inside the document, you might find it. The Indexer runs
continuously, so can be adding newly created documents to
the Index, as you create them.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/Advanced-tips-for-searching-in-Windows

If you neglected to configure the Indexer, then you don't have
that working for you.

It's possible to set up the Indexer, so that the index files
are written to some other disk and partition. But that
still doesn't mean that a temp file might not be created
on C: somewhere while it's working.

If you change the Indexer settings, and the Indexer spends three hours
creating a new index, you could easily overwrite some recently
erased files. So for your first search, don't change the Indexer.
And take the volume off line, if you want to run any addition
forensics on it. (The more writes that happen to the volume,
the more likely you're going to lose the letter.)

If you know the exact file extension, you can try a tool
like this.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/File_Formats_Recovered_By_PhotoRec

.doc Microsoft Word (OLE document)
.docx Microsoft Office "Open" XML (ZIP Archive)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuva

When recovering files that way, have the tool write
them to some other disk. The idea is, to avoid writing *anything*
to the disk that has the lost info on it. If the file is actually
deleted, the data clusters are still there and the file pointer is
gone. If you do enough writes, the data clusters get overwritten
(because as far as the file system is concerned, they no longer
contain anything of value).

You can also write your own software, to search the entire disk
sector by sector for the text. It'll still be there, as long
as there aren't a lot of writes to the partition. Such programs
can even be as short as a page of source or so.

HTH,
Paul

 

[BobbyM]

My wife spent hours compiling a letter in Word 2003.

And then it disappeared.

She sent it as an attachment to an e-mail but it arrived as a blank
document. The .doc shows 20kb but there is nothing in it.

The document has a file name and this file name shows up in Documents.
But, there is nothing in this document when I pull it up in Documents.
She said she saved the document regularly. It is not in the recycle bin.
It has disappeared into thin air. I did a search for the file name, no
luck. It only came up with the empty document.

I checked the "Save" options. It shows that the autosave it set for 1
minute.

I rebooted to see if the auto-saved file would show up. Nothing.

Where else can we look for this vaporized file?

Is there a possibility that it got saved in a font color that matches
the background? Assuming when you open the document, you're getting a
blank white page, then "select all" & change the color of the font to
black.

 

[Paul in Houston TX]

My wife spent hours compiling a letter in Word 2003.

And then it disappeared.

She sent it as an attachment to an e-mail but it arrived as a blank
document. The .doc shows 20kb but there is nothing in it.

The document has a file name and this file name shows up in Documents.
But, there is nothing in this document when I pull it up in Documents.
She said she saved the document regularly. It is not in the recycle bin.
It has disappeared into thin air. I did a search for the file name, no
luck. It only came up with the empty document.

I checked the "Save" options. It shows that the autosave it set for 1
minute.

I rebooted to see if the auto-saved file would show up. Nothing.

Where else can we look for this vaporized file?

Thank you

Walter
-
www.rationality.net

Word 2003 saves a blank doc as 20.0 KB (20,480 bytes).
One page full of typed lines comes out to 24kb.
Likely the file is empty. Probably overwritten by a space.
Open it with notepad and make sure.

 

[Jason]

On Sun, 25 Nov 2012 19:08:25 -0600 "Paul in Houston TX"

- snip -

Word 2003 saves a blank doc as 20.0 KB (20,480 bytes).
One page full of typed lines comes out to 24kb.
Likely the file is empty. Probably overwritten by a space.
Open it with notepad and make sure.

Isn't it great that an empty doc is 20k bytes! That's about 10 pages of
actual text. This would never have survived in the era of 360k floppy
disks, but inflation of this sort is now taken for absolute granted

 

[Joe from NY]

Word 2003 saves a blank doc as 20.0 KB (20,480 bytes).
One page full of typed lines comes out to 24kb.
Likely the file is empty. Probably overwritten by a space.
Open it with notepad and make sure.

Or use Word to "show hidden characters," in which case the invisible space
(or other non-printing character) will appear as a raised dot or a paragraph
mark or whatever.

 

[John Williamson]

My wife spent hours compiling a letter in Word 2003.

And then it disappeared.

She sent it as an attachment to an e-mail but it arrived as a blank
document. The .doc shows 20kb but there is nothing in it.

The document has a file name and this file name shows up in Documents.
But, there is nothing in this document when I pull it up in Documents.
She said she saved the document regularly. It is not in the recycle bin.
It has disappeared into thin air. I did a search for the file name, no
luck. It only came up with the empty document.

I checked the "Save" options. It shows that the autosave it set for 1
minute.

I rebooted to see if the auto-saved file would show up. Nothing.

Where else can we look for this vaporized file?

Try the steps here:-

http://www.ehow.com/how_5639892_restore-previous-versions-word-file.html

Also, if Quicksave (or whatever it's called nowadays) is enabled, as it
is in early Word versions by default, the information will still be in
the file and recoverable using Notepad or Wordpad, unless it's been
saved with a different name at any point. If it's been sent as an e-mail
attachment, the original file should still have the versioning
information in it right back to its creation date.

That's how they famously caught a fraudster some years ago...

 

[Jeff Layman]

My wife spent hours compiling a letter in Word 2003.

And then it disappeared.

She sent it as an attachment to an e-mail but it arrived as a blank
document. The .doc shows 20kb but there is nothing in it.

The document has a file name and this file name shows up in Documents. But,
there is nothing in this document when I pull it up in Documents. She said
she saved the document regularly.

For long documents, I long ago rejected the "Save" option in favour of
"Save as" for just the reason you stated. The first draft is saved as
"Mydoc1.doc" (or whatever you name it). The next is "Mydoc2.doc", then
"Mydoc3.doc", etc. That way you only lose your latest revision (unless
the HD dies, but that's another issue). When you are certain the
intended recipient has received the correct document, you can delete all
the previous versions.

 

[choro]

Sounds like what my friend manages to manage. I say that if there are
999 ways of doing something on the comuter he will invent a 1000th way
that will mess things up. Things like plugging an external device power
cable to the graphics card output of his old laptop. Don't ask me how
but he actually managed to do this. Now, that takes some talent, I tell
you. ;-)

And then he of course phoned me for help and I went round to see what he
had managed to do this time. I told him that he had fried his laoptop
mobo as the graphics card was part of the mobo. But, he protested, *I
pulled the power plug out the moment I heard tizzy sounds coming from
the laptop*! ;-)

Go and figure this one out...

It really takes all sorts!

--
choro
*****

My wife spent hours compiling a letter in Word 2003.

And then it disappeared.

She sent it as an attachment to an e-mail but it arrived as a blank
document. The .doc shows 20kb but there is nothing in it.

The document has a file name and this file name shows up in Documents.
But, there is nothing in this document when I pull it up in Documents.
She said she saved the document regularly. It is not in the recycle bin.
It has disappeared into thin air. I did a search for the file name, no
luck. It only came up with the empty document.

I checked the "Save" options. It shows that the autosave it set for 1
minute.

I rebooted to see if the auto-saved file would show up. Nothing.

Where else can we look for this vaporized file?

Thank you

Walter
-
www.rationality.net

From what you say, the file *is* there - it's just that it appears to
be empty. It could be genuinely empty if your wife had, for example,
pressed CTRL/A (intending to press SHIFT/A) followed by the space bar,
and then saved the file.

This would select everything and then replace all the selected text by a
single space. I would have thought that she would have noticed this
though before saving! ['Undo' (or CTRL/Z) is your friend in such cases -
but only in that session.]

Alternatively, it may have somehow got saved in a format which Word
doesn't display. I can't really think how that could happen, but I know
that one organisation sometimes sends me emails (not Word files) which
contains some duff HTML code which makes them appear empty. Try opening
the file in a text editor - such as Notepad - rather than Word. That
should show whether any of the original text *is* still there. [You'll
get a lot of hieroglyphics as well, but hopefully there will be some
readable text which you can copy into a new Word file].