Microsoft Word - Any way of getting a previous document back that has been overwritten and closed?

Jo4

Is there any way of getting a previous Microsoft Word document back that has been edited, saved and closed?  There is no previous version of it either.

I had cut part of the information within the document to move it else where within the document but I had not pasted it.  I closed the document before I realised what I had done because I had a migraine and the phone was ringing.

Jo4

Is there any way of setting something up to make sure this never happens again?

joeypesci

Change the auto save setting to about every 1min (can't actually remember how low you can go) but also check the auto recover location.

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word\

You might have to unhide hidden files. Also do a search for files starting with ~ as the hidden recovery file normally has that at start. You might get lucky but probably not if you've already saved it.

rmg1

If you've not copied anything else or restarted/logged out of your machine, it may still be in the clipboard.
Try opening notepad and pasting into there.

Heedtheadvice

- from memory here so needs confirmation...

Word has several facilities for helping out such as recovering from crashes (it actually works on a temp file whilst you edit that it can recover) but discards this when you do a save and close. Bear this in mind if you do have an issue as you can then access this file by other means. However if you open word again (and the original/saved file is the same (? Hazy here too) ) it overwrites that temp file so you have lost the chance to recover it - so if you realise first do not reopen word without finding out how to recover it!!

Also you can set word to backup your files but that only helps if you 'loose' the file and want to get back a second copy.

IMHO the best way is to have a separate backup system running (several proprietary apps suitable for this) set to keep a copy of everything you want backed up, not discard those copies (for a while at least!) and then take more backups of any that have changed since that previous backup. You need to set a suitable backup frequency that copies the files so that when you make significant changes be that over a week, day or your you can get hold of it to copy the bit you 'deleted' or otherwise changed.

If you already have a backup regime try to recover the file previously saved before the error storing it as another name to avoid confusion such as xxxxrecovered.docx.

Otherwise probably lost it and if it is an important doc you maybe need to think of backups, type and frequency?

Blackbeard_of_Perranporth

If you are using MS cloud autosave, you can revert back to previous versions. Open the document on onedrive, and on the top left of the window bar, you will see AutoSave. Turn this off, and you can get previous versions.

If you are not using cloud, onedrive, I am afraid you are bu99ered!

Jo4

joeypesci said:

Change the auto save setting to about every 1min (can't actually remember how low you can go) but also check the auto recover location.

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word\

You might have to unhide hidden files. Also do a search for files starting with ~ as the hidden recovery file normally has that at start. You might get lucky but probably not if you've already saved it.

It worked!!      Thank you sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much!!

zagubov

Bit late now, but from now on, set up a cloud back up facility. The free versions of Dropbox or pCloud would stop this happening.