Windows Forum·65,767 discussions

Document recovery

Tags: Cloud

I was working on a word document saved to onedrive when my computer crashed. Ive used all the word recovery/repair tools and downloaded some free recovery software but it simply says that the file is highly corrupted and gives me zero text. I’m considering using forensic software like winhex, but I am unsure if this will even work with documents saved on the cloud, and I am hesitant to try something that could make it worse. Hoping someone can offer a suggestion or solution. Thank you.

Topic

Re: corrupted document

In reply to Document recovery

A docx-file is nothing more than a zip-file with a lot of reasonably understandable xml-files that open in your default xml-viewer. With me, in the latest Windows 10, that’s (surprisingly) Internet Explorer.

In that way you can compare the contents of this corrupted document with any non-corrupted document, after renaming them to .zip in stead of .docx. Your chance of making it worse is zero if you work on a copy, not on the original file (but that’s so for everything you try).

Do the contents look like a Word file? Probably not. Then it’s unrecoverable.

The easiest thing to do: go back to your latest backup. Back in the time when there wasn’t yet a cloud, Word was set by default to save a local copy (well, everything was local, of course) every 10 minutes, and if the program or the system crashed, you were offered to use that. So with a backup made every 10 minutes, you only lost at most 10 minutes of work. A very nice feature indeed.

If your version of Word doesn’t do that right now, you always can go back to your latest own backup. If that’s 2 days ago you might have lost 2 days of work. That’s why backing up always is a good idea.

Be sure to check the settings for autosave to prevent this unhappy incident happening again. Googling WORD 365 AUTOSAVE tells where they are.

3rd Party Software Pros and Cons

In reply to Document recovery

Select your 3rd Party Softwares wisely because sometimes 3rd Party Softwares do nothing but create obstacles to you in future.

[Author]

Replies