Text in the document has become unreadable

[ChristopherSwanson]

So I have a file storage on my 1TB external hard drive of which I am sharing between my Windows 7 and Vista. One of the documents that I have has a significant amount of information that can not be recovered or replaced since the source of this information was placed in the document. However, I went to open the file today and I was greeted by:

ASCII Filter Options
Character Set: Western Europe (Windows 1252
Default Font: Times New Roman
Language: English (USA)
Paragraph Break: CR & LF

Noticing that everything looked okay I chose to open the document and basically it was filled with symbols and looked very alienlike / programming / or whatever you want to call it. The tool bar stated that it was Times New Roman font and nothing looked out of the ordinary. I was wondering as to how this issue can be resolved so I can recover this document and make it readable once more.

[Hagar Delest]

Hi and welcome to the forum!

What was the initial file format?
Check your backup in the user profile: [Tutorial] The User Profile.

[esperantisto]

What you describe, can be anything: a damaged file system, a physical fault on your storage drive, and, alas, an error when saving the file. You don’t even specify which file format you processed. The best thing you can do is to share the file so that someone could examine it.