Odd Problem With MS Word

[Augsburger]

Last night while attempting to finish some final details on my son's science fair project we discovered that most of the MS Word documents from the past three weeks including ones saved two days ago seem to have disappeared.  We performed a virus scan, search of the hard drive and can find no Word documents that have been saved in the past three weeks, whether saved to a folder or saved without designating a folder. Google queries for solutions haven't helped and this seems to be a random problem with no general solution.   

 

Has anyone here experienced this problem or is this just more example of my bad audio equipment luck migrating to my home computer?

[Pars]

Nothing in the Recent documents list in Word?

[Augsburger]

Nope, as if three weeks worth of work vanished in the last 24 hours. In the last three weeks MS word docs were being (manually) saved then opened regularly for changes with no problems.  Very odd,it is as if we ventured through a time warp.  PDFs seem to be OK, no Excel docs saved during that time so it seems to be confined to MS docs and they are not in the recycle bin either.

[n_maher]

I'd try to get a free tool to analyze your disc for recently deleted files.  If there are fragments they should be able to be located and hopefully recovered.

[guzziguy]

Greg, is this one MS file or multiple files?  If it's one, maybe you accidentally deleted it.  Either way, have you checked the trash to see if it's there?  If this fails, search your machine for the file, you may find it in an unexpected place.

 

Edit: If both of these fail to find it, Nate's advice becomes really valuable.

Edited April 4, 2013 by guzziguy

[TMoney]

Not the most powerful file recovery tool, but I find it often does the trick. I once accidentally deleted my entire music collection and this program saved it.

 

Plus, hard to argue with free.

 

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

[Augsburger]

Greg, is this one MS file or multiple files?  If it's one, maybe you accidentally deleted it.  Either way, have you checked the trash to see if it's there?  If this fails, search your machine for the file, you may find it in an unexpected place.

 

Edit: If both of these fail to find it, Nate's advice becomes really valuable.

Multiple Word files and yes checked the trash, and searched the hard drive for the document using a few variations of the doc title and the recycle bin.  Will go the Nate route as I hadn't thought of that possibility.    I guess we have been too freaked out to think rationally,need to calm down and think systematically.

 

* edit* Thanks for the piriform reco, I will try it tonight.  (fingers crossed)

Edited April 4, 2013 by Augsburger

[blessingx]

I think we're all trying to hit the basics first, so let me take a stab - have you tried a third party indexing tool to search for a string inside the files (including 'invisible files')? Just trying to eliminate the variable of the files existing, but not being indexed or shown due to a corruption. Afraid I'm unfamiliar with the best third party search tools on Windows, but there must be something similar to DEVON EasyFind on OS X.

[dsavitsk]

I don't mean this to rub salt into anything, but going forward you might want to install something like Spideroak that does real time automatic backup to the cloud. These things make a backup every time you save the file, and they keep all historical versions even if you delete the file. Good luck.

[Dreadhead]

BackBlaze is my favorite of that type. Though I'm honestly not sure how it works with deleted files and if it removes them from the backup.

[blessingx]

Not to further possible salt pouring, but if you find maybe upload copies to Google docs as a short-term backup (and keep working on them from there)?

Edited April 4, 2013 by blessingx

[Salt Peanuts]

BackBlaze is my favorite of that type. Though I'm honestly not sure how it works with deleted files and if it removes them from the backup.

 

They keep up to 4 weeks of file versions.  BackBlaze is also what I use, though I've never had to restore anything from them.

[Augsburger]

Thanks for all the suggestions even the "salt pouring" ones.   Yes, we tried doing the uploading copies to Google docs strategy but as with solutions that require the user to take timely action evidently it was quite a while ago since we did the backup of the document in question, the problem with doing work when everyone is dead tired.  I will make an effort to look into Doug and Chris's solutions going forward and will try to track down a third party indexing tool this evening as well. 

 

All suggestions are greatly appreciated, we knew better but were just not diligent enough.

[Torpedo]

Is there any chance you've changed the name or extension of the files, perhaps that you've included them into some compressed folder? I'd try a time search. Just in case, avoid any new file writing on that drive, if the files were deleted, you might overwrite them and making them irrecuperable.

[Nebby]

Thanks for all the suggestions even the "salt pouring" ones.   Yes, we tried doing the uploading copies to Google docs strategy but as with solutions that require the user to take timely action evidently it was quite a while ago since we did the backup of the document in question, the problem with doing work when everyone is dead tired.  I will make an effort to look into Doug and Chris's solutions going forward and will try to track down a third party indexing tool this evening as well. 

 

All suggestions are greatly appreciated, we knew better but were just not diligent enough.

 

Going forward you can install Google Drive for PC/MAC and set a specific directory that'll sync to google docs.

[Augsburger]

Is there any chance you've changed the name or extension of the files, perhaps that you've included them into some compressed folder? I'd try a time search. Just in case, avoid any new file writing on that drive, if the files were deleted, you might overwrite them and making them irrecoverable.

 

 

Going forward you can install Google Drive for PC/MAC and set a specific directory that'll sync to google docs.

Thanks for the suggestions but we had already checked for name/extension/key word and installed Google Drive.  The problem is we were not diligent with the back ups so the versions we have are earlier versions missing all the important data and comments.

[The Monkey]

This problem bothers me and I would like to see it resolved.  Probably a very stupid question, but were you guys saving to some sort of external drive that isn't hooked up anymore (e.g., external HDD, thumb drive)?

[Augsburger]

Well using the periform/recuva program and after 2 hours of analysis it appears that a months worth of MS Word docs were spontaneously overwritten and deemed unrecoverable.  Tonight I will try to recover some of these overwritten files but the prognosis is not good.  I searched around the net and chat rooms but could find no reason for 20-30 different word docs to be affected like this.  Is a corrupted windows user profile a possible source for this glitch?

 

Dinny, we were saving to the internal HD.  When searching on line it seems the only time something like this happened to someone else was when they accidently deleted the doc they were working on and saved a blank page with the same doc title or variations of that activity.  No one I could find had a month of many different word docs just disappear or be overwritten.  So regular saves of the documents we were working on over the past month did not matter as the whole document was overwritten and supposedly unrecoverable.

 

We use Eset Nod32 and performed another scan but found nothing.

Edited April 5, 2013 by Augsburger

[Torpedo]

Sorry for the bad news. I just hope this is not due to a malware, but then it could be a next to fail HDD. Have you checked the drive with Avast? I like the way it scans without loading the OS when you install it.

[Augsburger]

Eset Nod32 is a pretty robust AV program so that is all that we have been using for some time.  If we were infected with a malware wouldn't the malware wipe out the entire HD not just a month's worth of word docs?  That is what makes this problem so frustrating.

[Torpedo]

Yes, I guess it's silly the malware would just screw up with a few files, but only the designer of the bug knows what the hell pretends. OTOH isn't it possible that you're losing other files and you haven't noticed yet?