[wordsmith]

hi all,

i am in dire, dire, dire need of help (and a pack of cigarettes, although i don't expect you to help with that).

(sigh). last night i spent several hours working on a document that i then proceeded to save something else over by mistake. what happened was that i typed up my document, saved it, then cleared it out and was planning on saving the new file under a different name. but i didn't. i just hit save. i didn't realize i'd done it until this morning - AFTER i'd already turned off my computer last night and booted it back up this morning.

i'm a dead duck if i don't recover this file. dead, i tell you. i read somewhere that a system recover might help. but i don't have my hard drive backed up anywhere, so i'm afraid of losing files. i haven't worked on anything else today, so i'm not worried about losing anything from today. i just don't want to lose any of my important files.

HEEEELLLLLPPPP!!!!!

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I don't think system restore will help you, unless you have a restore point from the period of time between saving the original document and then saving over it.

It's going to be very difficult to get your file back, unless there's something I don't know about. Reason being:

When you delete a file in Windows, it's very often recoverable unless the area of the hard drive onto which it was written has been overwritten with something else. I believe that's exactly what happened when you saved the file a second time, with the same name but new contents.

The only (remote) possibility that springs to mind is this:

Most higher end document handling applications (Word, OpenOffice, etc) have an auto-save functionality. From what I remember, they will often save a 'draft' version of whatever file you're working on just in case the computer crashes or the power goes out. It's possible that there's an earlier version of your document saved somewhere thanks to this functionality, though it's probably a longshot. I could do a little digging on this possibility if you can provide the name and version of the application you were using to edit your document.

[kunwon1]

I don't think system restore will help you, unless you have a restore point from the period of time between saving the original document and then saving over it.

It's going to be very difficult to get your file back, unless there's something I don't know about. Reason being:

When you delete a file in Windows, it's very often recoverable unless the area of the hard drive onto which it was written has been overwritten with something else. I believe that's exactly what happened when you saved the file a second time, with the same name but new contents.

The only (remote) possibility that springs to mind is this:

Most higher end document handling applications (Word, OpenOffice, etc) have an auto-save functionality. From what I remember, they will often save a 'draft' version of whatever file you're working on just in case the computer crashes or the power goes out. It's possible that there's an earlier version of your document saved somewhere thanks to this functionality, though it's probably a longshot. I could do a little digging on this possibility if you can provide the name and version of the application you were using to edit your document.

[daniel_c]

system resore doesnt restore your files, it just restors the system, like installed programs or unistalled prorams

[kunwon1]

system resore doesnt restore your files, it just restors the system, like installed programs or unistalled prorams

Indeed, you are correct. Sorry about that, disregard the bit about system restore