Oh God, where did my paper go - Can be locked, the damn this is due right now

LadyM

So I started a paper on one school computer, e-mailed it to my Gmail account, then downloaded it onto a different school computer to finish. Which I did, about ten minutes ago. Except then the computer spontaneously rebooted itself.

Now here is the thing . . . I saved that paper multiple times while I was working on it. Hardly a paragraph went by but I was clicking the Save icon. But now I cannot find the paper on this same computer. I've looked on the C: drive, I've looked in the download folder, I've looked in my username account folder . . . I also tried looking at Word's "recently opened documents" list but there's nothing there. I am really kicking myself for not resaving it on the Desktop like I usually do after downloading something. (Or using GoogleDocs.)

Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions as to where I should look or where else a computer might save a file by default, bring 'em on. It wasn't a long paper, but long enough that it will probably not be possible to rewrite it by the deadline.

Arivia

You're likely out of luck. Either it was saved to a temporary place that got wiped like normal, or it was erased when the computer restarted because of an administrator policy due to it being a public use computer.

LadyM

Normally files stay on these computers after a restart (I know because I forgot to delete a couple papers off the desktop once, ha ha) so I guess they were saved somewhere temporary. Suuuuuck.

Robes

LadyM wrote:

Normally files stay on these computers after a restart (I know because I forgot to delete a couple papers off the desktop once, ha ha) so I guess they were saved somewhere temporary. Suuuuuck.

What text editor? go to file, then save as. the directory that save as opens up to is usally the last directory a document was saved to.

Robes

Or do a computer-wide search of the name of the document.

LadyM

Thanks for the advice, but sadly they turned up nothing. I think it's gone forever. I have typed up the world's hastiest, shortest, and crappiest replacement paper so I'll at least get partial credit. This can be locked now if the mods feel like it because I have to run off to the class in question now. Thanks for the help, much appreciated even though it didn't turn up anything.

Darkewolfe

In the future, there's a strong likelihood that there may be a version of the file named something like (making this up) 1hsgKhsI4456Osfu.doc in the folder where your word processor of preference temporarily stores files.

JebusUD

It is usually be a good idea to email yourself your paper often. Then it is in the servers and not likely to be lost because of one computer breaking. You could also have reopened the half done paper and continued with that. I hope that is what you did.

BoomShake

Get a thumbdrive. They literally give out 1GB ones at career fairs and the like.

Eat it You Nasty Pig.

it should still be in your gmail/google docs unless you deleted it from there

ed: oh, nevermind, I misunderstood your op

LadyM

JebusUD wrote:

You could also have reopened the half done paper and continued with that. I hope that is what you did.

I am sad to say the original file was not so much half-done as barely started.

The worst part is I actually had a thumb drive along at the time, I just didn't think I'd have any problems because I'd saved on those computers before. But usually I save on the Desktop, not the default downloads folder. I guess it just wipes everything from the downloads folder when it reboots.