Crash after power failure. Doc is now blank and appears to auto-generate as a new doc on opening

[Jbobjones]

Hey everyone

I'm new to this so sorry if anything's wrong!

I was in the process of writing my essay for university - I was around 3/4 of the way through - when I had a power failure in my laptop. Usually this isn't a problem; the auto-save feature brings up the latest auto-saved document, and notwithstanding that I save like I'm OCD (as all who have been stung by such an incident now do!).

So imagine my surprise when I open the auto-save doc from within Word to find a completely empty document. I opened it a couple of times, then 'save as'd it, only to find that my original essay document was gone. Further to this, the other auto-save documents that should have come up were also gone and the temporary files folder where these usually are is empty.



So I close all programs and go into the folder my original essay was contained in and see a very small document purporting to be my essay; presumably the auto-saved, blank version (although I definitely saved the recovery version as (the name of my doc + recovery). I open this and check the properties in the hope of finding a previous version. No such luck, however I do notice that it states that the document was created just then and had not yet been saved. This is odd, no? So I close it, open it again and it says the same thing again. Tried this a few times ten minutes apart and the same thing; it's utterly convinced it's a brand new, un-saved document created the second I open it!

No google search has brought any luck in this area and I must say I'm not at all useless with computers and have never heard of or seen this before. Excellent timing for a Microsoft lesson with my essay due in in around 7 hours!

I am currently in the process of creating a bootable Ubuntu USB flash drive in the hope of using various programs to recover this document, although I have no idea if it was somehow overwritten.

Any help would be hugely appreciated!

Please let me know if you want or need any specs etc.

Many thanks and kind regards

James