Word 2007 file corrupted

[joe2006]

I have been working on a book for the last few years by using Words 2007. For some reason when I try to open it I get an error saying the file is not found. Last time I was able to open it I was using it from an exernal hard drive. I had my computer unplugged and was using a laptop to add something to the story. I saved and exited and everything seemed alright. Later I plugged my hard drive back into my desktop and tried to open it and got the error. It has been working just fine until now. Is there some way to recover a currupted Word 2007 file?

[Vagrant0]

I had the same sort of thing happen to me a few years back. Unfortunately I don't remember exactly what I used to resolve it, but I did learn a few things.

 

First is that sometimes you can extract the text of the document by just opening it up in notepad+. While this might remove a lot of the formatting or insert garbage characters all over, depending on the encryption of the base file type you should be able to recover some amount of plain text.

 

Second, if it's a more heavily encrypted format, you can try converting the file type into another one or just a plain text document. Then trying to open it in notepad+ or another program. Just be sure that you're working with a copy of the file. If all else fails, try opening it in a hex editor just to see if there is even anything there.

 

Third... ALWAYS make backups. It doesn't matter how good of a computer you have, or how complete you try to save things, when you're dealing with larger projects, invariably something will screw up somewhere. Make one on your primary harddrive, one on your backup harddrive that you sync to weekly, then keep another 2-3 between flash drives or other portable media. As you hit milestones, you might even want to burn these to a DVD to sit on a shelf. You should also try to make an occasional milestone backup that is in a non-proprietary format since Microsoft, and a few other developers have this tendency to switch up their file formats every several years, making older formats garbled, worthless, or hard to convert.

 

Beyond that, if nothing works, you may have to look at data recovery services. You will also have to accept that it is likely that some or all of your work is now not recoverable.

[joe2006]

I was not able to recover the file so I restarted the book. I made back ups of it in two differant hard drives. Is there anyway to delete a currupted file? Every time I try to delete the old file it says it can't delete it because it is currupted.

[FMod]

Run disk check with surface error correction.

 

For books by far the easiest backup is simply e-mailing yourself a copy, and doing it often, like daily. Using a good mail service like gmail makes sure your data is backed up all around the world in Google's datacenters - a service that would otherwise be very expensive, provided to you at no cost. As long as your data volume is small enough, which a book is. You can have ten hard drives and lose them all; cloud storage won't.

[bben46]

I use Dropbox. They keep older versions in an archive. I also back up my work often to a USB, and have it synced through dropbox on multiple computers ( 3 currently) This allows me to work on my laptop when away from my desk, and the work will be there when I open the same document at my desktop.

I also break my writing up into chapters, each chapter is a separate document. That means that if any one document is lost or corrupted beyond recovery I only lose that one chapter. I try to keep my chapters below 10 pages. I do tend to go back and edit chapters a lot and really don't expect to ever publish anything as I just do it for my own entertainment.

 

My sister on the other hand insists on making her novels into a single long document - she has lost large chunks of her work ( that I was able to mostly recover) several times, I do have her set up on a regular back up now. She has been trying to get a novel published and it seems like every publisher wants it in a different format and will not even look at it unless it meets their format criteria.

 

There are several book writing programs available, but none I have looked at fit my writing style. Most seem to focus on the minutia of character creation, plot hooks, setting scenes and anything besides actually writing a story.