I'm going to cry!!!!

[mlm]

I have to vent somewhere. I know everyone's been in this position at one point or another, so don't flame me too badly....

I just spent a month writing out the clinic's new procedure manual. It has taken me nearly 55 hours to type this out, primarily because a lot of the information has never been written down. It's simply in a MS Word document. I saved along the way. I printed hard copies for revisions. I thought I did everything right.

Then last Saturday, I spent a marathon 3-hour stint doing final revisions and changes to the page order. I created a new file to do this, doing a copy from the old file and paste to the new one. (I know it's extra work, but I thought I should keep the old one for back up.) I hit the save button after every new chapter. I didn't print it this time because I thought I'd wait till I got to work on Monday.

Yet, I opened up the file today to find only a quarter of it there!! I have done every search I can think of, but the final version I had Saturday afternoon has disappeared completely. I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS HAPPENED!! :angry:

[orangezero]

i can't give you a real good answer. but the best thing to do is avoid writing to the hard drive as that may write over the spot where the file may be hiding. I don't want to get your hopes up, but there are programs that can find deleted files (but it would be much hard to get back files that are overwritten, if that makes sense)...

good luck, sorry.

[hcjilson]

Wait until Sean gets back, he may have some insight as to how to find it. As long as the button you were hitting was "save" not delete! :(:(

[DocInChina]

You said the complete final version you did on Saturday is missing but do you have the prior version?

You did not mention what operating system you are using. If you are using Windows XP, click the start buttom on the lower left. You should see on the right side of the popup screen a directory called "My Recent Documents". If the file is on your computer you should be able to see it there.

If not, open MS Word. On the top left click File. Scroll down towards the bottom and it will have the last several files you have worked with in MS and you can open it from there.

If luck has it the file will be in either "My Recent Documents" or under the File menu of MS Word.