I am looking for a very important file I last worked on this past Friday April 25th that I just cannot for the life of me find.



I am pretty sure I was clicking on the save icon on the top left corner several times because it was around 12 to 6 AM when I was working on it so I was thinking to myself, if this thing shuts down or slumber makes me do something stupid I'll lose it so I better save it. So yeah I'm confident I saved it.

Here's the twist though: I believe I opened the cover stencil for the project from a .zip file and worked on it from there without extracting it to another location. As I mentioned, I did save my work, so I know there must be some trace of it but I just can't find it on my hard drive, finding it should be easy since it has my name on it and I know the title of the project but I just can't figure it out.

Anyway this is due next Friday so I still have tomorrow to work my rear end on it again but it would be nice to get it back since it wasn't even completely finished to begin with.

I'm working on Windows 8 with Microsoft Word 2013. Thank you in advance and I hope you can save my life

Ordinarily, if you open a file from a zip archive, the zip software (e.g. WinZip, if that's what you use) creates a temporary folder for it and, after closing a document you've made changes to, will ask if you want to update the zip archive. Only if you answer 'yes' to that prompt will the updated file be written back to the zip archive; otherwise it will be erased.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Was it opened directly from an email? If so, it is in your Temp files (in addition to being inside a zip file).

Generally speaking, when you work on a Word project you should specify where it is being saved. You should not work on anything in Word directly from a flash drive or other mobile media.