Files corrupt after crash

[caupwhiting]

My laptop crashed and I lost everything. Used recuva today and was able to recover a lot of files, but not all. Now I am having trouble reading the documents which are supposed to be good. They are word and excel files. When I try to open a doc file, I get a page of characters, but nothing I can read. Does this mean there is nothing to restore, even though recuva says they are good?

[Hagar Delest]

Hi and welcome to the forum!

Do you see pound signs (###) when opening the files?
If so, not much to be done if Recuva did not recover enough data.

You can try with someone having MS Office, just in case.

[Zizi64]

When I try to open a doc file, I get a page of characters, but nothing I can read. Does this mean there is nothing to restore, even though recuva says they are good?

Yes, I think so.
If you have not some backup copies on an another media (Cloud, Thumbdrive, CD/DVD, another PC, etc...) then there is no hope to restore them.

They are word and excel files.

Are those files binary .doc and .xls type files? Always use the native, International standard XML based ODF fileformats. You can restore them (in some cases) manually: by editing the XML contents of the ZIP type archives of the ODF files.

...And always make backup copies of your important documents onto various media.

[RoryOF]

You could upload a sample file and we will check if there is any data; I don't hold out much hope.

[John_Ha]

See [Tutorial] How to find and un-delete Writer temporary files for instructions on how to identify and un-delete the temporary files Writer wrote while you were editing the file, and then deleted. You should be able to recover your file as it was when you last opened it or as it was when last saved with AutoRecovery. You may also find now deleted previous versions of the file in the folder it is located.