HELP!! I inadvertently saved over an important file . . .

[JaredSorensen]

I'm not sure how I did it, but I opened up a new Excel file and accidentally saved it over a file I've been working on all afternoon. Is there any way to recover the original file (per the last time I saved it about 20 min ago)?

I looked in the "wastebasket" and only found files that I had specifically DELETED. But I didn't specifically delete this one, instead I saved over it.

Any help would be very gratefully received. Thanks.

Jared

 

[Smitty]

Unless you have a backup or a previous version I think your only other option would be to try to find a restore point, which depends on your OS.

HTH,

 

[RoryA]

As best I recall, System Restore does not do documents. You could check your autorecover directory (look for .xar files), although the files are usually deleted when the workbook is closed normally. Failing that, you would need specialist file recovery software, which can be quite expensive. I take it you don't have the workbook set to always create a backup copy?

 

[Smitty]

As best I recall, System Restore does not do documents.

That's entirely possible Rory, although I recently ran across an article that stated system restore will include documents stored in the "My Documents" folder. I'll see if I can dig it up.

Note that I haven't had to do it on anything other than a new system that hadn't had files moved to it yet, and the results were less than spectacular.

My original comment was going to be "you're screwed", but I thought better of dashing all hope.

 

[JaredSorensen]

Thanks for your feedback. Sorry that it took me so long to respond.

I generally try to avoid the autocover feature as I work in a lot of files temporarily that I don't want to actually save my changes. Thanks.

Jared

 

[RoryA]

Autorecover doesn't save your changes to the file - it saves a backup copy of your file in a different location so that it can be recovered in the event of Excel terminating abnormally!

 

[RoryA]

Smitty,
As far as I know, one of the few safe places to have files during a System Restore (other than a network drive), is the My Documents folder as it will not overwrite them (i.e it won't return the folder to an earlier state). Files on the desktop for example may or may not be overwritten depending on their type. Useful articles here and here. Either way, I get the feeling we are talking purely about the work done yesterday, so I suspect your original thought may have been relevant!

 

[Jon Peltier]

I'm 99% sure it's too late for this occasion to recover anything.

What I use to protect against this type of mishap is Jan Karel Pieterse's AutoSafe add-in (free from http://jkp-ads.com). It saves a copy of open workbooks in a separate directory, and when it saves a new copy, the old one goes to the recycle bin, so you have a history of these files in the recycle bin. This program is more robust than Excel's Autosave feature and Autorecover. I have AutoSafe cycle about every five minutes, so I never lose too much work.

 

[JaredSorensen]

Thanks for all of the feedback and suggestions.

I think I'll have to check out the feature that Jon Peltier recommended. It sounds like just the thing to prevent this mishap again.

Thank you all!

Jared

 

[Jon Peltier]

Jared -

AutoSafe has preveented me from losing many hours of work.