Windows – How to recover partially deleted text in Word file

microsoft wordwindows 7

I have deleted part of the text of a Word file by mistake. That was 10 days back.

How can I recover the deleted text?

I have tried Recuva software.

Best Answer

Can you describe your problem further? You question is very ambiguous and open-ended.

I would suggest you read the help page on how to ask a good question.

Some questions to point you in the right direction:

  1. Did you delete text in a .doc or .docx and save the file afterwards?
  2. If not, then what exactly do you mean by "part of the text of a Word file"?
  3. Are you keeping back-ups of your files?
  4. Have you tried finding recovery versions of your file created by Word?
  5. What did you do with Recuva to recover the file?

If your answer "yes" to the first question, Recuva won't help you, nor will any other utility that restores deleted files. This is because when you modify a file and save it, the old version of the file gets overwritten by the new version in the memory of your computer. There are exceptions, where a program saves a new version of a file to a different location in memory, but afaik Word is not one of them.

What Word does, however, unless you have disabled this option in the preferences / settings, is create recovery copies of your documents. Though after 10 days and possibly multiple edits of the document you may not be able to recover the version you are looking for, it is still worth trying. If you are on Windows, this Microsoft support article should get you started.

If the above explanation it too complicated for you, and you do not understand the article I have linked, you may be better off contracting an expert to recover your file for you. If you do not have a back-up solution in place, you would do well to set one up or have it set up for you.

If you cannot do this yourself and do not want to spend money to have someone do it for you, and you are primarily concerned with keeping back-ups of versions of files you are working on, I would recommend using a cloud-based storage service, such as Dropbox or Google Drive, which automatically save every version of your files and let you revert to it later. These are merely examples, there are many comparable services out there.

Best of luck with the recovery!

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