Hi,



I was working on my dissertation the other day. Occasionally, I receive an error message saying that my USB has been disconnected when I leave the area for a period of time but leave the USB plugged in. This happened to be the case the other day while my dissertation was still live. I removed and reconnected the USB, made some final changes to the dissertation, and then saved the newest dissertation over the previous version on the USB. The file is now corrupt. The file is a .docx for Mac (v. 16.26); I am running a MacBook Pro (macOS Mojave, v. 10.14.5).

I hardly save anything to my physical laptop such that I work directly off the USB. I back this USB to a hard drive. Unfortunately, the former may not be the best route to take (I now have learned) and the latter did not occur prior to the dissertation changes described above (I'm left with a significant loss in work now). The IT department at University likely has nothing on the help someone here could lend.

Please advise!

Much obliged,
Max

Corrupt Word documents on a USB stick are generally not recoverable by any means. You may be able to use some recovery software that reads the USB memory directly, but even that's not guaranteed to produce anything useful. Failing that, you'll need to restore your dissertation from your latest backup and re-create whatever's been lost.

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

Paul,

Thanks for the reply! In everything I've read, working directly off a USB is ill-advised. I thought I was being savvy in doing so.

I tried opening the document using a text file, PDF, recovery options, etc. Fail. Coincidentally, I plugged the USB into a PC (I almost exclusively work off Mac) and opened the document using some text-like option akin to Mac's TextEdit. I was able to miraculously recover the majority of what I had completed, graphs and special text not included.

Again, your response is much appreciated.

-Max