Foolishly, i saved a Microsoft Word file over another one. I need to recover
the one i've saved over. I've been posting to other tech sites, but the
responses have not been positive. I have to believe that there is a way to
do this... if anyone knows of any tricks to get the file back, or a program
to download (free or otherwise) that could do the trick, please let me know.
the file is of much importance, and so any help would be absolutely
appreciated.

thank you

G Dawz wrote:
Foolishly, i saved a Microsoft Word file over another one. I need to
recover the one i've saved over. I've been posting to other tech
sites, but the responses have not been positive. I have to believe
that there is a way to do this... if anyone knows of any tricks to
get the file back, or a program to download (free or otherwise) that
could do the trick, please let me know. the file is of much
importance, and so any help would be absolutely appreciated.

thank you

Hi G,

The reason the other responses haven't been positive is that you've put
yourself in a very difficult position. If you're lucky, it *may* be possible
to recover some -- maybe even all -- of the text, but you'll almost
certainly lose all the formatting, and the process is going to be extremely
tedious. If you're unlucky, the information is permanently gone.

If you're lucky, (a) Word wrote the new contents of the file in different
sectors of the disk than the old contents occupied, rather than overwriting
the same sectors, and (b) any use of the disk since then hasn't overwritten
those old sectors, which are now marked as "free" in the file system. The
problem, of course, is that you no longer know which of the millions of
sectors on your disk used to belong to the document, because the file
allocation table (the disk's "address book") has been changed to point to
the new contents.

You can use a program called a "sector editor" to search the disk for the
old contents. This kind of program ignores the allocation table and just
looks at the sectors themselves. Some of the sectors may contain part or all
of the plain-text portion of the document, so you may be able to find them
by looking for unique or unusual words and phrases that were in the
document. The formatting information that Word used to change fonts, colors,
margins, etc. and any pictures that were embedded in the document will be
binary "gibberish" that you won't be able to recognize or recover.

I don't have a sector editor and haven't used one in some years. You can
search Google for ones such as the freeware at
http://www.roadkil.net/Sectedit.html or the commercial one at
http://www.winhex.com/winhex -- but these are just the results of searches,
not recommendations. If you don't have the time or expertise, you can ask
the good folks at OnTrack (http://www.ontrack.com) for a quote, but be
prepared for sticker shock.

As I recently said to another poster here, if a document is important to you
and would be difficult to reconstruct from scratch, then having only one
copy of it is a recipe for disaster. BACK UP!!!!

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org

We're assuming you don't back up all these important files of yours?


"Jay Freedman" wrote:

G Dawz wrote:
Foolishly, i saved a Microsoft Word file over another one. I need to
recover the one i've saved over. I've been posting to other tech
sites, but the responses have not been positive. I have to believe
that there is a way to do this... if anyone knows of any tricks to
get the file back, or a program to download (free or otherwise) that
could do the trick, please let me know. the file is of much
importance, and so any help would be absolutely appreciated.

thank you

Hi G,

The reason the other responses haven't been positive is that you've put
yourself in a very difficult position. If you're lucky, it *may* be possible
to recover some -- maybe even all -- of the text, but you'll almost
certainly lose all the formatting, and the process is going to be extremely
tedious. If you're unlucky, the information is permanently gone.

If you're lucky, (a) Word wrote the new contents of the file in different
sectors of the disk than the old contents occupied, rather than overwriting
the same sectors, and (b) any use of the disk since then hasn't overwritten
those old sectors, which are now marked as "free" in the file system. The
problem, of course, is that you no longer know which of the millions of
sectors on your disk used to belong to the document, because the file
allocation table (the disk's "address book") has been changed to point to
the new contents.

You can use a program called a "sector editor" to search the disk for the
old contents. This kind of program ignores the allocation table and just
looks at the sectors themselves. Some of the sectors may contain part or all
of the plain-text portion of the document, so you may be able to find them
by looking for unique or unusual words and phrases that were in the
document. The formatting information that Word used to change fonts, colors,
margins, etc. and any pictures that were embedded in the document will be
binary "gibberish" that you won't be able to recognize or recover.

I don't have a sector editor and haven't used one in some years. You can
search Google for ones such as the freeware at
http://www.roadkil.net/Sectedit.html or the commercial one at
http://www.winhex.com/winhex -- but these are just the results of searches,
not recommendations. If you don't have the time or expertise, you can ask
the good folks at OnTrack (http://www.ontrack.com) for a quote, but be
prepared for sticker shock.

As I recently said to another poster here, if a document is important to you
and would be difficult to reconstruct from scratch, then having only one
copy of it is a recipe for disaster. BACK UP!!!!

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org