Data Recovery Explained

Both a specialist skill and and a necessity for some, data recovery is something that we all hep we never need. If you've experienced that sinking feeling when documents you've spent hours creating are suddenly lost from view there maybe a number of reasons for this disappearance. Maybe you saved it to a different folder or sent it to the recycle bin. Or perhaps your computer crashed before you had a chance to hit Save.

Auto-Save Your Work

Prevention is always better than cure. You can make sure that your files are saved regularly using the auto-save feature in Word. By default, Word auto-saves your work every ten minutes, although you can increase the frequency.

Automatic Recovery

This feature comes into its own if your document was open when your system failed, as when you reopen Word it should automatically retrieve your file.

Temporary Reprieve

If your Word document wasn't automatically recovered when you reopened Word, there's still a good chance that your computer saved a temporary or 'temp' version of your file before it crashed. Word creates temporary versions of documents when you change them. These files are automatically deleted when you close Word. But, rather usefully, you can often recover these files when your system goes down by searching for a ‘temporary file'.

Using Search

Alternatively, a file could be missing, rather than lost or deleted - it's easy to accidentally save a file into the wrong folder. Track it down using Windows' search tool.Accidental deletion

If you've hit the delete button by mistake don't worry. Rather than disappearing completely your file has been sent to your computer's Recycle Bin, which you'll find on the Windows desktop (the icon looks like a bin).