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EvanBHenry

Trying to restore autosave/autorecovery files

You know how they say there are no stupid questions?

I had a flash drive fail recently. For various reasons, most of which ultimately stem from the fact that I am an idiot, I had a large amount of important work saved to the flash drive (mostly DOC and DOCX; maybe a few RTFs) and nowhere else. I'll spare you the boring details, but the flash drive is dead, and for now I am out that large amount of important work.

The computer in question is running Windows 7 and has Microsoft Office 2010 Starter installed onto what I believe is a hard drive partition (it has the drive letter Q, separate from C, but I'm virtually certain it's not on a separate disk). My only hope at this point is to use an "undelete" program to check for autosaved versions of those files, and I'm wondering where to look. Right now I'm looking in

C:\Users\myname\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles

and I'm not finding anything too interesting, as I think those are only files that I at one point had open, but never saved to a physical location.

What I'm wondering is whether there are any other folders that might also have at one point contained any files of interest, specifically autosaved versions of files I was working on that were stored on the flash drive; I know I've seen autosaved files that weren't saved to the same directory as the file itself. And I've recovered unsaved Word documents during power outages, etc., so I know they're being saved somewhere. Should I poke around in Q as well, or is that simple application data?

I'd like to do the same process with some Excel files as well (opened in Excel Starter, obviously), but I'm much more concerned about the Word files at this point).

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Answer

Jay Freedman

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it's extremely unlikely that you'll find anything useful.

Word does "autosave" to the folder listed in the Options > Save dialog (at least that's in the full Word product, not sure about Starter), which defaults to C:\Users\<your name>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word. But if you close the document normally, Word deletes that file as part of its shutdown process; the file (with an .asd extension) stays behind only if Word or Windows crashes.

If you work on a document and close it without saving the changes, Word makes a copy of the last autosave file (if there is one) in the UnsavedFiles folder that you mentioned. That copy is automatically deleted after four days or the next time you open Word, whichever is later.

The Q drive is a "virtual drive" that holds only the program files and some configuration information. There's no point in searching there.

There's a small possibility that there are some temporary files elsewhere. Even if you find them, they probably won't contain much, if any, of your documents.

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