When Word Documents Disappear Stay Calm, Try These Tips, and Don't Let It Happen Again Helen Bradley
Thu 4/11/02 -- You know the sinking feeling you get when you open a Word document and all you see is an error message? A few frantic retries later, it dawns on you that this file isn't ever going to open -- you've lost hours or days of work.
I can't promise to get your document back, but I can offer a few suggestions -- or at least help you develop better filing habits to reduce the risk of such trauma in the future. Here are my favorite tips for attempting a recovery, and for enlisting Word's assistance in safely saving your next file.
Breathe deeply. If you've accidentally deleted a file or discover that it's corrupted (truncated or filled with garbage characters), don't panic. You're more likely to cause irrevocable damage by trying to fix things when you're not thinking clearly.
Instead, walk away from the PC and carefully assess the situation. Did you simply save your file to a different folder (say, accepting Word's default when you normally put documents someplace else), or toss it in the Recycle Bin? If you've already emptied the latter, do you have a recovery tool such as Symantec's Norton Utilities or Roxio's GoBack? Plan a series of steps to try recovering the data. If a file's corrupted, use Windows Explorer to make a copy of it with a different name before trying anything, in case a recovery attempt causes further damage.
Think laterally. Before you totally give up on being able to open a corrupt Word document, try opening it in WordPad or another application that can read Word files, such as Corel WordPerfect, Lotus Word Pro, or Sun StarOffice. Still no luck? Try Notepad -- you'll lose some or all formatting, but you may recover some or all of the text, which is a good start.
Crash-resistant saves. Is your hard disk on its last legs, or is the power company working on the lines outside your house? Word's AutoRecover tool can save a document periodically to reduce loss in the event of a system crash or blackout -- instead of blowing away two hours' work, say, a power failure might cost you only the last five minutes.
To enable this option, choose Tools/Options and the Save tab, and check the "Save AutoRecover info every nn minutes" (around 10 minutes should do, unless you're a fast typist or the nervous type). There are two important caveats for using this option, however. First, AutoRecover is no help in recovering earlier work or past versions if you exit Word normally -- it's simply protection for those times when the program doesn't shut down properly. Second, it doesn't create backups of multiple files; if you work on more than one document at a time, you're gambling.
Save versions. To protect against making changes to a document and later being unable to roll them back to recover the original, try Word's Versions tool. This lets you save different editions of the document in a single disk file, so you can edit with abandon and still revert to yesterday's version tomorrow.
To save a new version, choose File/Versions and click Save Now. Type some text to identify this particular version, and click OK. Repeat the process each time you find yourself at a point in your editing that moves you to store a snapshot of the document as of that moment.
Access earlier versions. To recover to an earlier version, open the file and choose File/Versions again; select the version from the list, and click Open. You'll see both the current and earlier version in a split-screen view. The current version can be edited and saved as usual; the earlier version is a read-only file in that you can't save changes to it under the same name. You can, however, save your changes as a new document.
Version, save thyself. Prefer not to, or usually forget to, save versions manually? Tell Word to create one each time you close the document, using the option in the File/Versions dialog. Over time, this will lead to bulky, disk-space-hogging documents, so clear out unwanted versions periodically (choose File/Versions, pick a version to rub out, and click the Delete button).
Copy to floppy. A simple way to protect against loss of data is to save a duplicate copy of the file you're editing to a floppy disk or Zip disk or CD-R or -RW. Avoid using Word's File/Save option to do this, because it's easy to create problems when saving alternately to the hard disk and a removable disk -- for example, if you remove the disk after saving the file and find Word needs more available disk space to work.
Instead, save your document to a hard-disk directory or folder as usual, then make a backup copy to a removable drive. You needn't exit Word to do this: After your save, choose File/Open and locate the file you're working on, right-click on it, and select Send To, then specify the target disk from the shortcut menu. Click Cancel to close the File/Open dialog.
Backup, backup, backup. Another tool in the Options dialog (Tools/Options, Save tab) lets you create a backup of your Word file every time you save it. If you enable this tool -- the downside is that it automatically disables the "Fast saves" option -- you'll find the backup file saved in the same folder as the original, with a .WBK instead of .DOC extension.
