Close one

I almost had a heart attack! I just finished my Life science essay and I opened another .doc file while talking to pear on the phone. I didn’t realize that the new document was opened in the SAME MS word window (only in a different sub-window) and closed the WHOLE thing. They asked me about saving changes to blahblahblah and I just clicked no because I thought it was talking about the SECOND document. Then I looked at the taskbar and saw that no Word window was left!

I know that Word autosaves any documents to protect against crashes, so I quickly look at the usual place in the Office folder. It was not there. I had closed Word by normal procedure instead of a crash so Word had deleted the temp file. T.T

But wait! Normal deletion methods don’t actually DELETE the file, it just delete its reference (the icon) from Windows. The data is still there, but it will be classified as “free space” until the next data comes and overwrite that part of the harddrive. So I quickly opened Norton and looked for its data restore function. After a few scans here and there I finally found the file in a sub-folder under Windows. The file name was “AutoRecovery save of Document1.asd”, quite unexpected as normally the crash recovery files are .tmp so it took me longer to notice it. I believe this file was created as the copy that would be “AutoRecovered” by Word had it crashed instead of closed by careless little me.

Well that sure was exciting.