2018-05-13 13:05:05

I just made a really annoying mistake, actually dropped my keyboard and by mistake deleted all of the text out of a word document and saved it.

is there a way to restore the previous version of the document? it was a book review I'd put a lot of time and effort into writing and I really would rather not see lost.
I tried the "restore previous versions" option in the properties menu, but I was told "no previous version available" (which sort of makes that option a bit pointless).

i tried to find something in word for restoring a previously saved copy but there didn't seem to be any such option.
Frankly this is really! annoying.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-05-13 13:30:10

Okay tried a file recovery utility as well as looking in the "unsaved documents" bit. Neither helped. God this is bloody stupid, particularly since the restore points are every week and the document was one I started on Thursday night so no restore point annoyingly.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-05-13 13:45:03

Okay just checked again and guess what, the file history feature in word is only available if you use one drive! this means you only get backups if you pay fucking microsoft!

So, unless anyone knows some good file recovery tools it seems I'm screwed! fucking microsoft! this was something you could do in the nineties, but oooooh no, you have to pay for their! fucking stupid file recovery service, not you know, save stuff privately on your computer!

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-05-13 14:38:42

hi dark. unfortunately, even if you had system restore, system restore doesn't affect your documents. at least, I don't believe so, plus when I start it on my PC, it says the following. System Restore  dialog  Restore system files and settings
System Restore does not affect any of your documents, pictures, or other personal data. Recently installed programs and drivers might be uninstalled.
System Restore can help fix problems that might be making your computer run slowly or stop responding.

2018-05-13 14:41:24

Well even if system restore did, it only creates restore points every week and this was a file I made on thursday.

I've tried recovering the file with the "convert text from any file" option but it still doesn't show the older version of the text with my review.

The only other answer I found was some sort of file restoration tool, accept it was absolutely %100 inaccessible, and didn't even give you a context menu option which was just nuts!

I've even tried to see if I can find a clipboard history, but again no luck with that either.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-05-13 14:49:47 (edited by john 2018-05-13 14:50:55)

@Dark:
Its very unlikely file recovery software will save you here. That works on deleted files, not overwritten ones (the way to permanently and utterly delete a file is to overwrite it with anything else).
Your best (and possibly only) option is backups at this point.
System restore can create previous versions, but only if you explicitly enable it to do so (by default its set to system files only due to disk space requirements).
Unless you have a backup that includes a portion of the file, I'm sorry to say you're pretty much stuck.
You may want to look into a service like Backblaze:
https://backblaze.com
which will backup anything and everything for $5/month/computer.

2018-05-13 15:00:19

I pretty much backup everything myself automatically on a very regular basis anyway so I generally wouldn't pay for a service specifically, this was just horribly bad luck at the point I was copying my review into an email.

I am however really! quite pissed off at word 2016 not keeping backups around since when I had a similar problem back on xp it was no problem as there was always an auto saved item I could go back to and I assumed 16 was the same.

At the moment I'm trying to get file indexing to work so I can search for some of the text of the deleted file and hopefully find a backup if there is one , but its not working at the second.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-05-13 15:05:12

Dark:
In general, overwritten is overwritten.
I can't speak to word in particular or your setup, but I'd very strongly recommend you check your backups and see if a version of the file is there rather than trying to dig it out of autorecover data (which is usually deleted when you save a document).

2018-05-13 15:11:12

If I had a backup of that file on my external hd or somewhere elseI wouldn't worry and would've restored already, its just rather irritating that  I finished writing the thing on thursday, I actually was going to back it up today after sending it off to be reviewed, hence why I'm asking about recovering the text somehow.

its bloody annoying that word is so crappy these days with auto saving.

Hell if I could get previous clipboard history I could find it from there, or at least get the text back, but the first I knew it had gone wrong was when the text was deleted from the file, I saved a blank document and then copied some gibberish into the email.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-05-13 18:18:31

I don't know if this would work, but did you try the undo hotkey? That might bring the text back if you still have the window open that the document was in.

2018-05-13 19:27:44

Just as an aside, because you were talking about paying for OneDrive.
If you're registered with any educational institution, you get office for free if you log in with your institutional Email address and password. So long as you have access to that account, you have free office 365, which includes OneDrive (OneDrive sucks, but if it keeps backups of saved files then it just got a point in my book). from asking around, it seems like educational institutions are slow about getting rid of old email addresses anyways, so if you did want it for the future, chances are you could get it.
https://products.office.com/en-ca/stude … -education
P.S: In case others are reading this too, it applies to many school boards as well, not just University.

2018-05-13 22:45:57

@Jason Yep, ctrl z was the first thing I tried, sadly no luck since I'd already saved the file with the missing text.

@rashad, trying to actually persuade my university to even let me use anything but their completely inaccessible custom web mail system has been so bloody impossible I finished up just giving everyone around my uni my private address instead big_smile.
I do actually have a copy of office 365 because it was cheaper to do that than to pay for three different licenses for my pc, my laptop and my wife's laptop (plus my mum will probably get one when she finally upgrades her pc), however I'm not going anywhere near one drive with a ten foot barge pole since I like to keep my files private thank you.

I just find the fact that office no longer auto backups to the documents folder amazing! something which was standard in office versions up to 2010 has been removed in 16 (and I believe 13 as well), for no other good reason than because microsoft are scuzbags!

of course now I know this there are things I can do, I've for example enabled file history in windows with a six month limit so that it will store backup versions should I need them, I'm just shocked that something I could bank on back in windows 95, let alone xp  suddenly become a restricted paid service in windows 10 for no reason.

Can anyone say downgrade?

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-05-13 22:55:29

UGH! I'm sorry that happened. Happened to me once. I have a bad habit of writing things in blank documents and not saving them.

Kingdom of Loathing name JB77

2018-05-14 00:12:12

Ironically Jefb, if I'd done that it would've been okay, Word is actually better at keeping past versions of stuff you don't! save than stuff you do big_smile.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-05-14 10:14:59

While there's almost certainly nothing you can do in this instance, I'd recommend Dropbox for storing especially documents like this. With Dropbox, the instant something gets saved or updated, it gets uploaded to their servers, and they keep thirty days of old versions. Enough said.

Someone else recommended Backblaze, and I do too. I know you keep backups yourself, but with Backblaze or another similar service, you set it and forget it. You don't have to remember to back things up, it just does it for you, automatically, without you having to think about it. It just works.

2018-05-14 12:19:57

dark, turn on auto recovery in word options.
tell it to save  your file every 1 minute.
in future you can auto recover files you've been working on if exactly this situation or power outage happens.
but maybe you in luck and its already on.
here's how to try and get your document back.
If you’ve saved the file
1.
Open the file you were working on.
2.
Click File > Info.
3.
Under Manage Documents, click the file labeled (when I closed without saving).
Office 2016 Manage Documents

4.
In the bar at the top of the file, click Restore to overwrite any previously saved versions.

There's a place for me in this universe.

2018-05-14 12:49:21

@jaybird, usually when I'm working on something major such as my phd I upload a spare copy to sendspace every day or similar, so anyway. the issue in this instance is that I had written most of the review on thursday, (well actually Friday morning), was away friday and saturday and came back on Sunday. The thing was actually finished, complete, done etc.
The problem was the mistake I made copying the text into the email to send off to the book review site.
The irony is if I'd decided to take the thing with me I probably would've stuck a copy on sendspace anyway, it was just that it was nearly finished so I didn't bother, ie, more bad luck than anything else.

@~Fbc, unfortunately as I said earlier, word 2016 will only auto save and restore if  save in microsoft one drive or in the sharing folder, not if you save locally in my documents, which as I said is a major step down from previous versions.

I checked this yesterday during my long run around trying to undo what I did, if your saving in my documents the auto save box is disabled and the history and restore buttons are inaccessible, indeed its sort of ironic that you can always pull stuff back you didn't save but not previous vvertions of things you did.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-05-14 17:57:00

There seems to be a bit of termonology confusion here.
Dark: can you please explicitly define what you mean by "auto save"? Presently, I'm understanding it to mean "save a new version of the  file every x minutes without overwriting my primary document and maintaining all previous saves", which is not a feature I've ever seen in office (or any software anywhere).
Rather, I suspect you're getting it confused with "auto recover", which is a feature designed to protect you from power loss, software crashes and other issues outside your control. Auto recover does maintain a copy of your document, but so far as I'm aware it does not maintain multiple versions. Additionally, it is by design that auto recover information is removed when you explicitly save your document. This is because auto recover is intended to help you mitigate the damage of a crash between intentional saves, not to reverse user error, which is technically what we're dealing with in your case (even though you didn't intend to break your document, it was still your action that caused the damage and both situations are the same to the computer).
In general, auto recover systems presume that you, the user, are smarter than them, the software, so when you say to do something, the computer presumes you meant to do it, gets out of your way, and does what you told it to.
Its also worth noting that this is not localized to Microsoft. Its general practice in software, and Microsoft actually has one of the best autorecover setups I've seen, so that particular blame is misplaced.

I can't recommend automatic backup software strongly enough. There's a saying: "data you do not have backed up is data you do not want to keep." Manually uploading a file is very far from automatic backups, especially since some backup software does keep a history (Backblaze stores the last month of changes to a file, for instance).

2018-05-15 03:31:52 (edited by UltraLeetJ 2018-05-15 03:33:16)

and this is why I precisely pay for a service... I think enabling document versions on the pc creates quite a bit of duplicated copies, and that is something I would use for just a few ones not all of them..
If you want to know, I used carbonite up until this year when their prices really went to the roof and their service was just blatantly incompetent (I still cannot believe they do not support accented or some symbols when backing up files, just ridiculous for what they charge)
so now I have been happily sticking with and recommending backblaze . They do have a 30 day window for keeping file versions just like carbonite did, see https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/art … s-of-Files

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