Help me find my thesis; lost in microsoft word?

[Alex]

My word setting state that it autosaves a recovery file every ten minutes, but the recovery folder doesnt have the file I worked on for two hours. 

[derby]

My word setting state that it autosaves a recovery file every ten minutes, but the recovery folder doesnt have the file I worked on for two hours. 

did you try this?

if it's not in the normal temp directory, it may be in the temporary internet files.

look in %userprofile%\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files

look for a folder name that begins with OLK if you're using outlook.

where are you downloading it from? what are you downloading it with?

[m0t0g0th]

if you hit save, and it was allowed, then open the version that is attached to the e-mail and see if you recognize it as the "new" version.
my system doesn't allow this to happen, but it has happened to others.

[Alex]

Couldnt find it in temporary internet files either. I got it from my gmail account. I figure I must have hit "open," instead of "save" when I started. Still though, it must have been going somewhere...

Im sure the version attached to the email is still the old version.

[derby]

Couldnt find it in temporary internet files either. I got it from my gmail account. I figure I must have hit "open," instead of "save" when I started. Still though, it must have been going somewhere...

Im sure the version attached to the email is still the old version.

yup... it shoulda been in %temp% if you just saved it from word. sorry, mang.

[Alex]

Well, I've given up and am now working on re-writing what I did. Oh well. I'm absolutely positive it will turn up as soon as I'm done, but that's just how things work.

Thanks for the help.

[somegirl]

Ah well, hopefully the rewrite will go quicker and be even better than the original.  good luck!

[oldjackbob]

Not to say I'm perfect (or even remotely competent ), but I decided long ago to do frequent saves, and if I'm working on a really important file, from time to time I'll save it as a different filename, and then periodically swap back and forth between the two filenames during my work session -- that way, if something disastrous happens to the file I'm working in, I have a not-too-distant copy in the other file.

What "disaster" could possibly happen, you ask? Well, in the past twenty years (yeah, I'm old) I've had a couple or three occasions where I lost power during a disk write, resulting in a complete loss of data -- in a critical file. On those occasions I was REALLY glad I operate the way I do! 

Just trying to offer a heads-up.

[knightrider]

in word 2007, click on the circle in the upper left, goto word options in the lower bar. now goto save, there are 3 file locations there, check the autorecover file location, default file location, and also check the server drafts location.
 
word 2007 automatically saves every 10 minutes to an alternate location.

hope this helps.

[eyeboy]

i think the only thing left would be to search for all files and folders modified in the last day or so... whenever you edited the thing... and them sort the results by date modified, you should get something if it saved a copy at all... word keeps all it's changes and revisions inside the document but unseen unless you tell it to track revisions or something... if you can find it you could open it in a text editor like notepad and it should have the revisions you made in it

BTW, this is a cautionary tale for you word users... just because you delete it doesn't mean its gone... it's just hidden sometimes.

good luck!!