I have a very important Word 2010 file that has been deleted. I believe the kids may have deleted it as it's not available on the desktop where I had saved it as well as in the recycle bin. I have run data recovery software that sees the file and can recover it only to be junk (it's not available in the first found partition). What is the best way to salvage this file?
What I have tried:
- Did a search to see if the file had been accidentally moved.
- Used a few data recovery software one of which found the files I required but they are now just a bunch of crazy symbols and asks for conversion. Any of the options doesn't work.
- Googled for multiple solutions on damaged and corrupted word documents but no software was able to fix or even acknowledge that it's a fixable word file.
copied and renamed to.zip– this just asked for the first of multiple parts zip file.
Its only been a few days and there are plenty of disk space so I don't think it would have been re-written so quickly.
Can someone suggest how I can salvage the file – if I can?
Best Answer
STOP! Have you been doing all of these things to the drive itself, or to a cloned copy of the drive? If the former, it may already be too late. If the latter, good. As you have had no luck with data recovery software, it may be time to use a professional data recovery service. This will only be worthwhile if the document is worth at least several hundred dollars to you, however.
There are other options. You could do a scan of the drive itself in Linux, for example, but it is very likely that any decent data recovery software has already done this.
You may also wish to consider regular backups from now on.