<p>16 yr old is in tears saying she can not find her independent study school work that she worked on yesterday. She is sure she saved it every 30 minutes. She also can not find a 2nd word document that she worked on yesterday.
We have done the internet search and tried all the different searches and the documents seem to be gone. She is convinced it is not something she did and is the computers fault. I feel bad for her, she worked over 5 hours on it and now is having to start over. It is partially her fault since she has been told to back up her work.
When you search the entire computer we find nothing dated yesterday.
Could there be any explanation aside from that while she thought she was saving them for some reason she did not?
have searched the trash can, temporary files, *.doc</p>
<p>Did you search by date?</p>
<p>Can’t help you with this - but recommend you install and use the free version of Dropbox for your D’s computer in the future. It will automatically backup your files and is simple to use. The greatest things about Dropbox is that if your computer goes on the fritz you can access your documents from any computer so long as you remember your sign in and password. My D’s computer died when she was in the middle of end of term papers. She borrowed her roommate’s computer and accessed her files through Dropbox.</p>
<p>It’s free and our family has installed it on our laptops as well as our old desktop. I have no financial interest in the company - just think it’s a great product.</p>
<p>Singersmom- we know about Dropbox. Older d uses it. Younger D resists everything we tell her. She is learning the hard way.
Yes, we searched by date</p>
<p>Did she create a new document from scratch?</p>
<p>If so, create another new document from scratch, when you hit “Save” it will prompt you for a file name. From this you can see what directory the file would be saved in by default. Look in that directory to see if anything is there.</p>
<p>If she actually saved it, it might show up on the list of previous documents, usually seen under the Files menu.</p>
<p>Is it possible she could have saved it to a drive on another machine or a thumb drive?</p>
<p>Look in the directory that ends with /Temp</p>
<p>This is a directory, normally associated with email, which doesn’t show up in all searches.</p>
<p>it isn’t showing up in the previous documents. Not possible that she saved it to another machine. She is saving what she is working on today to a flash drive plus printing out the work she has already done, plus the work she did on Tuesday that is not due till next week. Wouldn’t the default save location be the same as it previously was? She has had this computer for 3 or 4 yrs and hasn’t made any changes.
Is the only possible explanation be that she thought she saved it but didn’t?</p>
<p>If she had opened an email attachment and saved it without changing the directory, that would be saved to temp. Then, if her other document was open, the default directory switches to temp as well… yes I learned this the hard way…</p>
<p>I will have her check that out when she gets back home.</p>
<p>It is also possible that she inadvertently saved it in a different format, like txt rather than doc or docx. when she goes to open make sure she is looking for all documents not just ones formed by her word processing program.</p>
<p>Can you go to Start—Recent Documents (or similar), it should come up on that. If you do that directly from the Start menu it will show you all documents regardless of format, or you can also do it within Word (File/Open/recent documents) or other windows tools.</p>
<p>Good luck… :/</p>
<p>She has class tonight at the CC. I will give her the list of new things to try when she gets home. Nothing is due till Tuesday noon so she has time to redo the work. She is just in panic mode right now. She is never going to get everything done that she needs to get done.
Just a Mom- she looked in recent documents within Word and also on the computer as a whole.
She is convinced it is the computer not her. She has been hounding her Dad that she needs a new computer.</p>
<p>so its not in recent documents or anything?</p>