vadfs

My stupid computer was set to automatically restart every time there is an update, which I didn't know. But I assumed microsoft word would recover the documents I was working on, but it didn't. For some reason it only recovered the first page of one the two documents. AND Word was set to save every 10 minutes! so I lost about 5 days of important work. I downloaded a program called word recovery and about 800 documents were retrieved, but not one of them were the documents i was looking for, and some of them were like 8 years old. Then i downloaded PeretoLogic data recovery. I don't think it found the document either, but I don't know for sure since I need to buy the program to recover any documents it lists. So what should I do?? Are the documents gone forever? I already looked in the temp. folder and pretty much everywhere else. Why would it only save one page???? I could contact Microsoft, but their support costs $49 per call. If I knew I would get the documents back I would just call them, but if there's no guarantee I don't want to waste money. It's microsoft 2003 by the way, if that makes a difference. Any advice????

gistek

I have Office 2007, but 2003's probably similar.
When I entered "recover" in the help search box I got the following:

Click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click Open.
In the Open dialog box, type the path and file mask to display a list of the automatically saved files. The path and file mask for Word depend on the version of Windows you are running:

Windows Vista
%userprofile%\AppData\Microsoft\Word\*.asd

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or Microsoft Windows XP
%userprofile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Word\*.asd

Click the name of the file that you want to recover, and then click Open.

vadfs

thanks for the advice, but unfortunately it didn't work. I saw one of the documents i lost, but it wouldn't open for some reason. I tried to recover the text by opening it using that function, but to no avail. Any ideas why it won't open? the document i'm talking about is the one i mentioned that was partially recovered. I have since saved and changed that document, so maybe this is why it wont recover the original? Any ideas where the other document that i lost went? any help is appreciated because these were very important documents.

gistek

Click the round button inthe upper left, then choose Word Options (at the bottom of that menu). Click the Save side tab, and check the locations of the AutoRecover and ServerDrafts. It might be possible that something is still in there.

Unfortunately I don't know of anything else that can be done to recover the files you can't find.

For the one that you can find, change the filename (not the extension) and see if it will open.

If that doesn't work, try changing the suffix to .txt and open it with Wordpad (Notepad might work if it's a small file). You'll have to search through and delete a lot of formatting codes, but at least you'll have the text.

Please remember, AutoRecover is not the same thing as Save. Get into the habit of hitting Ctrl-S frequently. you can set Word to always create a back-up when you save.

Good Luck.

nego-oh-oh

you could download a program called

nucleus kernel for word. it a trial version

to at least let you know if you document

are still there. if nk doesn't find anything look

for a few others---google-----