Is There Any Hope?

[AetherFox]

Hello tech-savvy people. After spending about two hours writing research paper on The Merchant of Venice, I hit save and closed out. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, except that I had downloaded the copy I was editing off of a gmail file, and so it was saved in some strange folder, God knows where. I ran multiple searches on the computer for it, but only found the one I had downloaded, which was the unedited one. It appears that the file is completely gone from my computer, but this can't be, can it?!

What I'm really trying to ask is, is there a way to retrieve that when I don't know where it is?

If there isn't, does anyone know what happened?

Thanks to whoever helps with this...


(P.S. I already tried opening the recent word documents, but the only Merchant of Venice document in there was the unedited version. I am absolutely sure that I actually saved it, though.)

[bluewind95]

Well, there IS hope, but it's kind of... faint. You'd have to manually look for the file in the temporary internet files folder and hope that you haven't visited enough things to make the computer delete it. It might also not quiiite have the same name. But that's where the computer leaves files you just open like that.

If you've visited enough places or restarted your computer, or cleared the temp files... then yeah, there kind of is no hope.


(Also, if you have Firefox, you can see your downloads and open the containing folder to see where it is. But again... temp files are likely to be gone)

[Icewalker]

Yeah, there's a folder of temporary files where that would be stored. On some computers at least it's just named 'temp'.

The temporary file doesn't clear that often, does it? Unless you've actually emptied it, or surfed the web a lot since, it may well still be there. Just find that folder and comb through it carefully.

[Yarram]

Ironically though, it'd take more time to search for the file than to re-write it probably. There isn't much hope for you.

[Anuan]

This why I'm paranoid about saving; I will 'save-as' the first time, and often 'save-as' the next few times JUST SO I KNOW IT'S OVERWRITING IT and every subsequent save involves me holding control and pressing s about seven times.