Find missing text in MS Word 2004 on a Macbook

April 26, 2010 11:22 AM

Argh! Just pressed don't save on MS word (2004 for Mac - Macbook OSX 10.6.3) and now trying to locate autosaved previous versions of document. Help!!! More incompetence inside....

Because I have the attention span of a newt, I was referring to one doc (doc A) while typing a report on another (doc B - the wanted doc). I went to close doc A but accidentally closed doc B without saving it. Arggh.

I then (stupidly) opened doc B up again and found I had lost about an hour's work - plus I think this has got rid of the old version of doc B and now I have an autorecovery file of doc B with the unsaved text still missing.

I've tried looking on the interwebs and on askmefi but can't seem to find a way to get hold of the missing text. For what it's worth I had autosave turned on, so it must've saved 8 times in the hour and twenty that I was typing - but I have no idea where to (or if) I can find these files.

Help! I'll even try and use the mysterious terminal...

Thanks.... even just for listening.

posted by you're only jung once to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Unfortunately, clicking "Don't Save" also deleted the autosave files.

I'm afraid there's nothing you can do.
posted by Mwongozi at 11:47 AM on April 26, 2010

Response by poster: That's pretty much what I thought. Just to check... it's not worth me using any disk recovery tool from the internet is it?
posted by you're only jung once at 11:48 AM on April 26, 2010

Response by poster: And of course, thanks for replying!
posted by you're only jung once at 11:48 AM on April 26, 2010

Best answer: No, a disk recovery won't help on a file that has been manually deleted. Modern journalling filesystems will quickly reuse the space so that there is nothing useful left to recovery.

Sorry.
posted by Mwongozi at 3:52 AM on April 27, 2010