Data recovery problem

My wife, a professional writer, recently lost about 10 days worth of work that she'd really like to recover if possible. She was working on an almost 400 page manuscript and had made substantial revisions to approximately the first 80 pages of the MS Word manuscript working on her 1 year old Dell XPS 1210 laptop (running MS Vista Home Premium). She unintentionally somehow hit a combination of keys on the left side of the keyboard which highlighted/selected her entire manuscript text, erased/deleted it from within MS Word, and overwrote it with a single character, a lower case "d". Because it was erased from within Word and overwritten, the lost material, the entire manuscript (but see below), isn't in the recycle bin. And she doesn't like "versioning" so that Word feature wasn't turned on.

We have a full backup of the hard drive to an external USB drive (made with Acronis TI) which includes the manuscript, but she had done a week to 10 days of additional work which she had not backed up. (Yes, she has multiple flash drives and knows she should back up her work daily, but she didn't do it.) I'm thinking there surely must be programs that would run from a command line or Dr. Dos environment or something similar that would allow us to scan the hard drive looking for her lost work.

We shut down the computer without saving anything else to it. We have had one professional computer wiz look at it. He attempted a recovery using Search and Recover but said he could find no trace of the lost manuscript with that software. I've heard of that program, but don't know if it's really suited for this type of recovery problem.

Even though the file was overwritten with a very much smaller file with the same file name, we're talking about an 80 GB hard drive, about half full, and the manuscript was about 1.2 MB and the first 80 pages (which is the chunk she had been re-working) would be considerably less than 1.2 MB. So it seems to me there's a very good chance that most, if not all of, her lost work is still there on the hard drive and could be recovered if we can only find the right software tool or tools for the job.

Does anyone know of any software we could use that would: 1) allow us to search our way through the entire hard drive; 2) properly display lost Word data as recognizable Word text; and 3) allow us to copy/recover such data as Notepad, Wordpad or Word text files so we can then re-edit it as needed and, eventually, paste or even type it back into Word.

We don't want to pay really expensive data recovery fees (we had a quote of $700 to $1000 from one such service). So if we can't find some good software tools that aren't too expensive, that will allow us to attempt recovery, my wife will probably just resign herself to the loss of some of her work, re-do it as best she can, and chalk this up to experience and a tough lesson to learn -- always back up...ALWAYS. Murphy's Law...etc.

Thanks for any useful suggestions.

 

Have you tried the Previous Versions feature of Vista? If not, here's how:

Right click the Word file, choose Properties, navigate to the Previous Versions tab. If any are listed, choose one, and click on Open WITHIN that dialog window. If it doesn't have the information you lost, and there are additional previous versions listed, you can open any or all of them (one at a time) to hopefully find the missing work.

Also, for future information, if she does something like that again, kill the MS Word process from the Task Manager, then reopen Word, and when it asks if you want to restore the document you were working on, don't restore... just reopen the document again fresh, and it should be as it was last autosaved (unless you have autosave turned off, which isn't a good idea).

Another thought: I recommend getting real-time backup software... I know Seagate's FreeAgent externals come with a trial of their backup software, where you can choose to automatically backup certain files, folders, etc. on a regular basis.

 

Yes, we looked for previous versions created by the Shadow Copy feature of Vista automatically but weren't able to find any. My understanding is that only the business versions of Vista (Ultimate, Business, and Enterprise Vista) will actually display these auto saved versions of most user files and allow recovery of them. But, supposedly, even the Home versions of Vista create such auto backups of most user files but don't allow recovery or even show that they're there. I read about a freeware tool (available at PC World's website), called Shadow Explorer, that's supposed to make it possible to view and recover Vista shadow copies in the home versions of Vista. I downloaded and installed the tool but was not able to find any such files with it at all. Perhaps our version of Vista had the Shadow Copy feature entirely removed or turned off. But the description of the tool and info that such shadow copies are auto created even with Vista Home is in the latest issue of PC World (Aug 2008) on two different pages and there's no mention there that the feature may have been entirely turned off or removed from some copies of Vista. At any rate we did look for such Shadow Copy backups but had no success.

As for killing the MS Word process from Task Manager and then reopening the document....I don't think that would have made any difference as the document got overwritten immediately with a file consisting of a single character. She was typing along fast and apparently hit several keys at once and before she realized what was happening it was already too late and the file was erased, except for a single character which, when we opened the file again, we found had overwritten the long manuscript file. Maybe she could have used the "Undo" feature in Word to recover her file, but, again, I'm not sure since she had overwritten the file accidentally somehow and I'm not sure "Undo's" survive an overwrite to the file. In any case, she panicked and before asking me for help shut down Word and rebooted the computer and then Undo couldn't undo anything.

Thanks for the info about the Free Agent program. We'll look into that. And thanks for your response and all the suggestions.

 

Here is a program that worked well for a friend of mine although not on my daughters lost document (hers was written in Hebrew so that may be the reason)
DOC Regenerator 2.11 (shareware)
http://3d2f.com/programs/26-431-doc-regenerator-download.shtml
This program worked for her
http://www.word-recovery.net/