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Question

Trying to restore autosave/autorecovery files

Mar 27, 2014 10:17AM PDT

You know how they say there are no stupid questions?

I had a flash drive fail recently. For various reasons, most of which ultimately stem from the fact that I am an idiot, I had a large amount of important work saved to the flash drive (mostly DOC and DOCX; maybe a few RTFs) and nowhere else. I'll spare you the boring details, but the flash drive is dead, and for now I am out that large amount of important work.

The computer in question is running Windows 7 and has Microsoft Office 2010 Starter installed onto what I believe is a hard drive partition (it has the drive letter Q, separate from C, but I'm virtually certain it's not on a separate disk). My only hope at this point is to use an "undelete" program to check for autosaved versions of those files, and I'm wondering where to look. Right now I'm looking in

C:\Users\myname\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles

and I'm not finding anything too interesting, as I think those are only files that I at one point had open, but never saved to a phyiscal location.

What I'm wondering is whether there are any other folders that might also have at one point contained any files of interest, specifically autosaved versions of files I was working on that were stored on the flash drive; I know I've seen autosaved files that weren't saved to the same directory as the file itself. And I've recovered unsaved Word documents during power outages, etc., so I know they're being saved somewhere. Should I poke around in Q as well, or is that simple application data?

I'd like to do the same process with some Excel files as well (opened in Excel Starter, obviously), but I'm much more concerned about the Word files at this point).

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Other ideas.
Mar 28, 2014 1:51AM PDT

Ever mail or print these out? I once lost a document and a prior version was still in my mail.
Bob

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Yeah...
Mar 28, 2014 5:25AM PDT

Yeah, I mailed off some earlier versions, but not since the last round of work. I'm out about 20,000 words of material, which is a pain in the neck and other body parts.

I think I have a nice lead on directories to look through with Undelete and TestDisk, though, so I'll update once I've tried in case anyone else is interested.

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I see you posted it was a 4GB stick.
Mar 28, 2014 5:38AM PDT

Dropbox gives you 2GB just by signing up. No cost at all. I also can use Google Drive up to 15GB for free.

Given such nice systems today it's getting more and more rare that folk lose it all. Well, there are those that have concerns about safeguarding their stuff but they would, you know.
Bob