Windows 10 File not saved - reasons/recovery

[arasnus]

Hi,

yesterday I was working on a document. Today I realized I lost a TON of changes, roughly 5 hours of work. My last save should be either from 20:00h or from 23:00h (didn't work there, PC was just running). My actual last save, according to windows and dropbox, is from 14:00h. I have absolutely no idea how this could happen, I don't think something like this has ever happend to me before. Consider the following:

• I usually have a habit of saving every 2 lines or at least after every paragraph, I consider it extremely unlikley that i simply forgot to save for 5 hours straight
• There were no error messages while saving
• The only possible recoveries word provides today were for even earlier versions
• There were no automatic saves by word
• The windows version history doesn't show any files either
• Even dropbox's version history has no changes listed after the version I currently have

So I think my changes weren't deleted afterwards, they simply were never saved to that document. Those are the reasons for that that I can think of:

• The changes were saved to another file. I maybe have multiple versions of that file without knowing (unlikely, but propably my last hope)
• Between the last change (20h) and presumable the last save (23h) pc was in energy saving mode, maybe that caused some really weird error

Does anyone have another idea what could have caused this and, more importantly, another idea on how to recover the lost changes? I already tried searching for other files that were changed yesterday with default windows search, but I don't know how reliable that is (only file I found was a shortcut called '[documentimlookingfor](2).docx' in the auto save folder, no idea why)

 

[arasnus]

Just managed to recover it... even though I should see invisible files I didn't see a "WRLxxxx.tmp"-file, which i now found via windows search. This one is from 23h and seems to contain everything. Still no idea how this could happen though

 

[kemical]

Hi,
glad to hear (read) you at least recovered your files.

How old is the machine?

Did you have a unexpected shutdown?

 

[pnamajck]

" Just managed to recover it... even though I should see invisible files I didn't see a "WRLxxxx.tmp"-file, which i now found via windows search. This one is from 23h and seems to contain everything. Still no idea how this could happen though "

WRLxxxx.tmp - Google Search

(yet another perplexing mystery solved)