Lost 2,000 Word Essay. Please help me find it!
 

Ok, so let's start off by saying I've tried doing extensive searches on my harddrive with 5 different programs, but they can't seem to find the "exact" file name. Anyways, so here it goes:

I downloaded a .doc file with firefox (my half done report from one computer to another) I said "open" which put it into the Temp folder (C:\Doc & Settings\User\Application Data\Temp) Soo, there's my mistake. I began editting the paper, thinking I had put it somewhere else. I kept hitting control S to save, not really thinking about where I had the document. After I was done I closed it.. Now, today when I went to go find it, I couldn't find it anywhere. I did searches as well as data recovery attempts to try and find it. Do u know if there's something I haven't tried that is going to be a sure way to get it back? Otherwise I'm going to be writing quite a bit tomorrow. Please help if you can!

Thanks in advance,
Alucard

First thing to try is to do a search on the entire drive for "*.doc" (no quotes) and see what comes up.

if by chance you emptied your temp folder, if you haven't done much other work on my HD, you can try a recovery program like Stellar Phoenix FAT & NTFS (google the program and search here for the patch). You may or may not recover it. If you can't (and didn't find the document via method above), you're pretty much SOL.

I tried to recreate what you did by downloading a DOC from my e-mail, changed some words... then hit Ctrl S... then close.

Doing a windows search will not look through this folder.
If you file is still recoverable, it'd be in

C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Temp


Also, it was listed in my MS Word (also Wordpad) in my recently opened Documents (under FILE option)

Try this. When you click on your start button, do you have menu that says "my recent documents"? That lists all the documents, like music, videos, word documents, etc that you opened.

If you don't have this option, then

right click on start button --> property --> start menue --> custimize --> advanced --> and check the "list most recent documents"

Appreciate all the comments, the document was not opened overnight, and from what it seems the document simply disappeared. Using file recovery programs, even doing the deep scans it doesn't even find the original document. Since the paper is due tomorrow I think I'm going to suck it up and just re-write it. Thanks for the attempts though guys :)

Most files in Temp, once you close the program that was using them, are immediately deleted.