Recovering Word 6.0 (Mac) documents

April 4, 2005 9:40 PM

I just closed out of the entire Word window, without thinking. I had two documents open, one of which was pretty important. When asked to save changes, I clicked no because I thought I was being asked about the unimportant document. AutoRecovery is on, but only every ten minutes, and so I still lost alot. Now normally I am a frequent saver, but I ended up tending to someone else for a second when my error hit. My question: is there anyway to reach a temp file or something on my system (10.3) that would allow me to manually recover my work?
posted by gastevens to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Unfortunately, probably not. If there was an easy way to do it, you'd expect that the "AutoRecover" feature would already use it.
posted by xil at 11:52 PM on April 4, 2005

Sadly, no. When you clicked no, the memory buffers that contained your unsaved file bits were purged. Autorecover helps in instances where the program quits unexpectedly or the system crashes, which didn't happen in this case.
posted by pmbuko at 12:16 AM on April 5, 2005

A couple things you might do are:

1. File -> Versions -> Automatically Save on Close
2. Tools -> Options -> Save -> then change the interval at which an autorecovery is made.

Sucks to lose documents.
posted by Hildago at 8:50 AM on April 5, 2005

Obviously, that's for the future. Nothing to be done about the present.
posted by Hildago at 8:52 AM on April 5, 2005

How important is "important"?

A temporary file would have certainly have existed at one point -- deleted and even overwritten data can be recovered from your hard disc by extreme methods if necessary. I lack the expertise to do so myself, but can refer you to the right people if really necessary. Bear in mind that this would costs you hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars to do.
posted by randomstriker at 8:03 PM on April 5, 2005