Recovering overwritten file! Help!

[Warwick]

I am writing a novel for a game company. I have used Open Office for a year now and love it. Late Friday night I finished a bout of writing and saved as normal. I am working from a file on a jump drive because I move between comptuers. Then I did a back up by using Windows Explorer to copy the file from the jump drive to the internal hard drive of my laptop. I've done this a thousand times. This time something went wrong. The files got reversed. I saved a week-old file over the newest novel file. It's 80 pages lost! I haven't shut down the computer or saved anything else to the jump drive. I have opened the file again to make certain it did, in fact, save over a week's worth of writing, and it did, but not saved it again. I've done all kinds of searching and can't find any kind of backup or temp copy file. Is there any way to recover this file or am I screwed?

[Cambirder]

Have a look in your user backup folder, although if backup is not on then I'm afraid you may have lost those 80 pages.

You should find it here.

\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\OpenOffice.org\3\user\Backup

[RoryOF]

If you can remember a distinctive word used in your last 80 pages, you could search all files for a file containing that word. This will be slow, but it might find something.

[atdrummin]

Hi - Is there a mac version of finding accidentally overwritten files?

Also, will this work if I've already shut down the computer?

Thanks!

[Persistent]

I would like to thank the person who suggested making a search for an overwritten file using a word in the text.

I had overwritten a file and saved that version by accident.I did NOT have the back up facility switched on (I do now - thanks also for that suggestion from someone else)
Restore point does not work as it excludes common suffixes like .doc and .xls
Neither do recovery programs work as they are aimed at recovering deleted files and can not help with over-written files.

I tried a number of ways but none of versions recovery or shadow versions reflected the fairly primitive system I am using Open Office org3 on Windows XP professional ver 2002 Service pack3. I searched application data backups & temp files etc
I tried searching by the name of the file and that did not work

I restored the computer to the last previous state - when I knew the file was in existence ( although I am not sure if this is of any importance.) I then searched using a very specific term that I knew was in the file - I also used the advance settings search such as file size, time span etc

Result! It came up on the search and reloaded perfectly. A few cautions - I did this within the same day of overwriting. But I had saved to that filename overwriting it twice ( that is supposed to worsen the situation)

So don't give up - you may be able to recover an overwritten file!

[John_Ha]

For others looking at this thread ...

Edit: See Using Recuva to un-delete Writer temporary files for help recovering the temporary files which Writer wrote while you were editing the document, and then deleted when Writer was closed. The post has been extensively updated [June 2016] to show how AutoRecovery files can be un-deleted for .odt files; for files which have never been saved; and for .doc files.

Windows has the option to keep different versions of system files which usually isn't switched on - r-click any file > Properties > Previous versions > click on How do I use previous versions for more information.

Neither do recovery programs work as they are aimed at recovering deleted files and can not help with over-written files.

That is incorrect. You need to search for earlier temporary files which are now deleted, but which were created before the file was over-written - see below for how to do it.

See these posts for further ideas to recover files - they explain what the temporary files you are searching for are called.

Using 7-ZIP

Inside an odt file

Hints on how to prevent it happening

Using RECUVA to recover Writer temporary files

Another on RECUVA