The Black Hole!

[oncemorealoft]

Major trauma almost in the household as daughter prints of University essay for submission tomorrow. Fortunately before she closes down the essay that the whole family has eaten and breathed for the last few days, she prints it off.
Deciding to make a back-up copy she goes back to the computer to open the document to e-mail it to herself. Nothing there!
After looking in the obvious places, I do all sorts of searches and permutations. Still nothing.
It turns out she has downloaded from her Hotmail account a previous version of the essay that she had originally e-mailed to herself and started working on it. Not being particularly a) computer savvy, b) environmentally aware c) sensible, she has just been leaving the computer on over the last couple of days and pressing the save button every now and again.
Now I would have thought this would bring up a 'save as' option if this hasn't been specified after a download, but no. And it doesn't appear to have gone to any (accessible) 'temp' folder, although I assume it must have been somewhere on the computer until she closed it.
For my own piece of mind I went back and did exactly as she did: downloading the document, making some changes, hitting 'save' and closing.
Sure enough - no sign of it.
Fortunately, she has the hard copy and is pretty relaxed about it. It's been bugging me though so I thought I'd share!

[jamied]

i dont get what you mean properly. You saved a blank document over the university essay? is this what you mean. Please try and explain a little more clearly.

[maxell]

If it was a word doc, open word then File at the top look down the list for the doc name should be near the bottom of the list. Or try start then my recent documents see if its in the list.
Word will tend to save that type of file in
C:\Documents and Settings\All\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5 as a temp file. CFY.......... so unless you have cleared your internet history it might still be in there try a search for CFY
Max

[42ongo]

Good advice from the previous correspondent
A very valuable lesson about working with e mail docs
some other suggestions
1 always give a version number of a doc that will be modified many times
easy to find out if you are working on the correct one

2 When downloading the e mail attachment for the first time in a session always do "save as" to a known place on the computer such as desktop or my documents

3 If you cant find the doc try downloading another attachment using the save command and make a note of the temporary file name where the system will save the attachment

4 Once you know the path for temporary files you can search for the missing file using the search facility on window explorer hopefully you can find the file

good luck

[roach]

oncemorealoft,
Thanks for the share! I understand exactly what you have explained as it happened a few weeks ago to my wife. Also a Uni student and an assignment that was a month in the works was lost in the same way....she was working on a self emailed copy that just disappeared in the same way you described. Fortunately, when she is not around I pop in and back up all her work in 3 different ways so only 2 days work was lost. I spent hours trying to retrieve what I knew had to be there but to no avail!