[ms office - 2007] Overwritten Word File

[somabc]

Well the **** has really hit the fan here. Looks like someone has overwritten a word document containing a students answers to an exam with a blank document.

 

Is there any way to recover the data? I have some pretty heavy duty file recovery software and nothing else has been written to the computer. Does word save temporary files elsewhere that I should be looking for?

[elsiegee40]

Do you use volume shadow copy?

 

Logon to a user that has access to the folder that contained the document. Right click and select Properties. Choose the Previous Versions tab and look at the Previous version for the time soonest after the file was created/saved by the student.

 

Good luck!

 

There is also the possiblity that the student fouled up the save in which case you have a problem.

[somabc]

No this PC was completely standalone for use in an exam. Network / USB / CD / Floppy were all switched off to prevent cheating.

[DrPerceptron]

Word save's Auto Recovery files every so often (assuming they haven't been disabled)

 

They usually reside within the %APPDATA% folder somewhere.

 

You might have luck flicking through the Office button, or asking the mighty google where they're saved.

[mossj]

i beleave word creates a temp file (usualy named w*randomnumbers*.tmp & hidden) in the same place as where the document was saved (and overwrites it every 15mins or so)... however i'm pretty sure it deletes it when the user does a clean exit. However the file did exist on the disk and won't have been overwritten by the blank exam. Edited May 18, 2009 by mossj

[FN-GM]

How did you get on?

[powdarrmonkey]

Temporary files get emptied after a successful save (they're just temporary, after all) and Office 2007 finally started truncating files, too, so I don't think you're going to have any joy

[Jamo]

There should be an autorecovery file if the PC hasn't been used since. appdata/micro$oft/Word i thinks. If the .doc has been written over you still might be able to recover some text using Photorec or something