Help! Lost unsaved document.

Have you brought up Word to see if it lists the document (or shows it in Recent)? It will often give you a choice of an earlier version or a recovered version.

Have you done a search for the file?

Do you mean you never ever saved it? For months? You didn't save it as a document?

Dear God, you had no backup copies? Is it even possible at this latter-day stage of personal computer use that you didn't back it up onto another device, or the cloud? Seriously?

I really hate to sound irritated, but we've had many many threads, commonly in the Tech Help forum, about this very issue. NEVER EVER EVER keep only ONE copy of your work. As in NEVER.

I know that doesn't help you at this moment, but really, it just needs to be said.

caw

Lol. I always only keep one copy. Because I don't give a shit if I lose it. Dust in the wind.

The sky is falling.

KTC said:

Lol. I always only keep one copy. Because I don't give a shit if I lose it.

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Well, then, your comments don't count. Gettingby obviously does give a shit. As would most people.

caw

blacbird said:

NEVER EVER EVER keep only ONE copy of your work. As in NEVER.

I know that doesn't help you at this moment, but really, it just needs to be said.

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Seriously. I'm amazed by how often this happens in a day and age when they make software which can back up all your documents automatically. I have my system set up to do everything automatically, from saving every 10 seconds while I'm writing in case the power goes out to creating a fresh back-up copy on a separate drive every hour. I make additional manual back-ups, but the automated system guarantees I can never forget.

blacbird said:

Well, then, your comments don't count. Gettingby obviously does give a shit. As would most people.

caw

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I've had a lifetime of not counting. It shouldn't stop now.
I do, however, feel for those in the throes of panic over lost work.

Don't get this, not when saving a file takes a single click, and backing up another copy for safekeeping takes seconds. If you left your file open on your computer for months, it's hardly surprising it finally crashed.

So you never created a file and saved it at all, not even your working copy?

If you've tried searching by file name, and it's not anywhere on your computer, you're probably SOL.

Save early, save often.

I thought I was pretty careless for only saving documents in two places: flash drive and hard drive.

If you remember the name, can you run a search? It might still be lurking in a temp file somewhere on the hard drive. You know the date, and that it was a Word document - that might help narrow it down.

Otherwise, your only option is a rewrite. It shouldn't take months to recreate what you'd been working on - you know the story better by now, and quite possibly the new version will be an improvement.

And this time, save. Then save again to a flash drive and/or the cloud.

When it autorecovers things, you need to save them immediately from the recovery. Don't wait. Of course, you also need to save more frequently than once every few months. Ideally using the 'save as' option occasionally, so you have several copies of different versions. That doesn't help with a hard drive failure, but it does help if one version gets corrupted.

Copying versions to flash drives and the like is nice, but keeping multiple copies on your main computer is the step that comes before that. And before that, making sure you have a saved version rather than keeping it open all the time.

One word for this situation:

DROPBOX.

Get an account. Srsly. The basic is free and I can't recommend it enough.

What Ben says.

There's something to be said for having important documents backed up someplace where they'll still exist if your house burns down or something. And it's tidier than the old-fashioned method of sending e-mail attachments to yourself periodically.

I suppose an occasional hard copy might be good too, you know, in case there's an emp. But if there's an emp, I probably won't be too concerned about my novel anymore.

KTC said:

Lol. I always only keep one copy. Because I don't give a shit if I lose it. Dust in the wind.

The sky is falling.

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I take my writing, my career, and myself, a heck of a lot more serious than that. I also take the writing of others a heck of a lot more serious than that. Your writing may not be worth caring about, but mine is, and so is gettingby's.

gettingby said:

Does anyone know how to find an unsaved document? It is a story I've been working on for months. I know. I know. Should have saved it a bunch of times, but I just left it open on my computer. Then word crashed, but it was auto recovered. Now, I can't find it anywhere. Please help.

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You need to find where Word auto-saves to. Depending on which version of Word you have, you get there a different way, but someone there's a option called "paths", and this tells you where everything is saved.

gettingby said:

Does anyone know how to find an unsaved document? It is a story I've been working on for months. I know. I know. Should have saved it a bunch of times, but I just left it open on my computer. Then word crashed, but it was auto recovered. Now, I can't find it anywhere. Please help.

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After my computer got hit with a virus, I was able to reset my entire computer to a previous time and date (the day before), which restored all of my documents and got rid of the virus. If you saved the draft even once, you might be able to try this trick and at least get a portion of it back. That said, if it was only ever open on your computer and never saved, I don't know if this will work.

ETA: I was able to do this on a PC, and looks like you have a Mac, so again--not sure at all what results would be. Have you tried going into your Word options settings to see what location on your computer your Autosave is set to? For example, my Autosave does not go to Documents or even what I would expect the Microsoft file to look like, but to something like /app/roaming/Microsoft/etc. You can usually browse the folder from Word.

This happened to a coworker of mine a few years ago. The lost document was, as I recall, quite important (we were working for Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities). This is what I instructed her to do, and it worked:

Apple menu > Recent Items > Documents

If you see your doc in the list of items that comes up, click on it. It should open. Then immediately do a "save as" (but just be sure not to "save as" back into the trash or hidden folder).

If it's not there and you haven't emptied your computer's Trash since the document disappeared, it is very likely there somewhere. One suggestion would be to take it to a nearby Apple Store with a Genius Bar or some other authorized Apple repair facility. They may be able to recover it for you.

I might be able to come up with other possible solutions. Which OS and which Word are you using?

In any event, besides using DropBox, flash drives, and the like, buy an external hard drive and make daily (or or more frequent) Time Machine backups of your entire computer. I tell you from experience that it may well save you a world of grief.

Another thing to try, perhaps: Each day, or even more often, when I am working on a manuscript of any kind--fiction or nonfiction, my own or a client's--I do a "save as" with a date. If something happens to the particular Word doc that I am working on and it is irretrievably lost, I have never lost more than one day's work, because the previous one is sitting there, unopened. So I wind up with, for example: NDoyle-As_By_Request-141228; NDoyle-As_By_Request-150118a; NDoyle-As_By_Request-150118b; NDoyle-As_By_Request-150119; etc.

Good luck, Gettingby. I feel your pain!

Wait, wait. You say it does autosave? You're in luck then. It does exist. What version of Word are you running? I'll walk you through finding it, because since you'd never given it a name, Word picked one for you, which is likely just a string of numbers you wouldn't recognize as your doc.

gettingby said:

I know I should have saved. I worked so hard on this. I am so sad. I tried calling Mac support and Microsoft word. My autosave is set for every ten minutes, but there is no trace of this story. In way, it breaks my heart.

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I didn't realize you had an Apple computer. If the document is saved anywhere you should be able to use Spotlight to find it by putting in a unique term (like a character's name). Even if the document didn't have a title, Spotlight searches the content of documents for your keyword, and it won't matter where it was autosaved to.

But if you never saved the document and gave it a name, autosave may not have engaged. I don't use Word, so I can't say for sure, but some programs only start autosaving once you've saved and named the document.

I'm still flabbergasted that anyone would skip the basic step of saving a document they care about. Leave a word processor open long enough and it will eventually crash, and Word for Mac has a bad reputation for reliability to begin with.

Cathy C said:

Wait, wait. You say it does autosave? You're in luck then. It does exist. What version of Word are you running? I'll walk you through finding it, because since you'd never given it a name, Word picked one for you, which is likely just a string of numbers you wouldn't recognize as your doc.

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gettingby said:

I think I have to give up at this point. I tried Apple support once more. The guy was able to remotely look at my computer through screen sharing. We looked everywhere. I was able to recover the first three pages. The other twenty are gone. I am going to try and rewrite this. That's all I can do.

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gettingby said:

I know it's crazy that I didn't save. I feel terrible. And now that I've given up looking anymore, it just sucks. Really, really sucks.

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Did you read Cathy C's post? She isn't Apple support. Give it a try.