Tip #4056 - Lost Documents
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Lost
Documents
Have you changed your
Internet Service Provider (ISP) lately? If so, during the transition,
did you happen to lose some e-mails you wanted to keep? Or, how about
this: you downloaded or saved a document and for the life of you, you
can’t find it on your PC. Either way, don't panic, because all is
not lost! Actually, nothing is lost, because your documents are there
somewhere. It’s just a matter of knowing how and where to look for
them.
Awhile back, my daughter did not come home from school at her usual time.
I called the school, which called her bus and they reported that she had
never gotten on the bus. She was missing. So, in working with the school
and the local police department, we started looking for her in the places
where she ought to be (for example, the school, our street, etc). We then
expanded our search to places she was not expected to be, but might have
wound up for some odd reason (like the recreation center). Now, please
note that I only use her as an example here, because she did in fact arrive
home safe and sound later on.
This relates back to your documents (be it an e-mail, a document you downloaded
from the Internet or an e-mail you received) in that neither my child
nor your documents have vanished off the face of the earth. Sometimes
documents (and people) just wind up in odd places!
Unless you're using a Web based e-mail account (like Google, Hotmail or
Yahoo!, for example), you probably have a POP (Post Office Protocol) e-mail
account. There are tons of wonderful technical explanations in books and
on the Web about how this works, but all you really need to know for our
purposes here is that if you use a Web based account, your messages are
stored on the Web, whereas with a POP account, they are probably stored
on your PC. That way, you can still view them offline.
This also means that
they are still somewhere on your PC, even if you change your service provider.
For example, when I switched from Infinet to Time Warner Cable, I wasn't
readily able to see my old e-mails from the Infinet account anymore. And
that became a big problem when years later, I needed something from them.
The method for recovering
lost POP e-mails is the same as the method for recovering missing documents,
so let’s address that first. I used this method when a spreadsheet
a co-worker had created for tracking certain statistics at work was saved,
but no one could find it.
Now, when my daughter
went missing, we started looking in the places we thought she ought to
be and you do much the same with a missing document. Did you save it in
your My Documents folder? Did you save it on your desktop? Did you save
it on the C: drive? Is it on an auxiliary storage device, like a flash
drive or CD ROM? Once you’ve ruled out the places it could have
gone, you’ll have to expand your search, but just like it wasn’t
practical for the people looking for my daughter to ask every single girl
in every single business in town if she was my daughter, you don’t
want to start opening every single folder on your hard drive. Some of
them aren’t even easy to find. They’re just in strange places,
like subfolders of subfolders and with names like “XZH67FGHY.”
Don’t ask me why!
I had to give the
police a description of my daughter (height, hair color) so that they
would know what to look for. You also have to give your computer a description
of what you’re looking for. Luckily, there’s a place to do
that and an easy way to do that. Let's check it out!
Click on Start
and choose Find (or it might say Search).
Next, choose Files
or Folders. You should then get a screen that looks like this:
Patience will be a
virtue here. Unless you remember the exact name of your document, you’re
going to have to employ a few ways of describing your document. Let’s
start by assuming you are looking for a Word document. First, check the
Look in field to make sure it’s set to search the entire
hard drive (C:), just like above. If it’s set for the A: drive (floppy)
or Documents, for example, your computer will only look in those places
and you’ve already looked there, so it would just be wasting your
time.
In the Named
field, you really don’t have to have the exact name of your document.
For example, I’ve called this document “Wherefore Art Thou,”
so let’s look for anything with “Wherefore” in the title.
But, and this next part is important, since you’re not searching
for an exact title, you want the computer to find anything that has that
word in the name. This is critical when you’re looking for a document
with a name you’re unsure of. You do this by adding *.*
at the end of your search term. This tells the computer to search
for anything that has this word anywhere in the document name. Let’s
try to find this document.
Notice how I’ve
typed the description into the Named field. Next, click Find Now.
Looky there! It found
it. You can now open that document by double clicking on its name.
Now, what if you don’t
know the name of the file? What if you're looking for an Excel spreadsheet
that was saved before it got a proper name or maybe it was downloaded
from an e-mail and you don’t know where it went?
Well, you can find
types of files by using the same Named field, but instead of putting in
a description of the document name, you can put in a description of the
document type. You can do this by clicking on the Advanced
tab in the Find All Files box and choosing your file
type from the drop down menu.
Let’s see if
I have any kicking around.
Quite a few, it turns
out! It’s just a matter of checking the most likely ones out to
see where the one you want is.
Now, it’s time
to find a lost e-mail. Let’s say I was looking for an old Infinet
e-mail (which had the extension of “infi.net” from my friend
Sam).
This time I’ve
chosen E-mail File from the drop down list:
I’ve also gone
back to the Name and Location tab and entered “Sam”
into the Containing Text field, because more than likely,
the e-mail is probably not named “Sam,” but it will have his
name in it.
Let’s see what
we get!
I got nothing! Okay,
I know they’re on there somewhere, so it's time to expand the search
some more.
To make a long story
short, you will need to keep expanding your search until you start getting
some hits. They are there, I promise! I finally just searched all file
types for my old Infinet e-mail username “nealshaw” and take
a look at what I found:
Seventy files! Most
of them are cookies, but several are folders in which the e-mail I'm looking
for probably lies. Here’s what I found in my Netscape Users folder:
Mail files, including
the Sent ones, the Trash ones (the ones I thought were gone!) and of course,
my old Inbox. When I double click on one of those, it will ask me which
program I want to use to open them. There are a ton of e-mails stacked
in there, it turns out, so I chose to use WordPad or Word. Please keep
in mind that this can be a time consuming process, especially if you have
a lot of files, etc. on your PC and have been using it for years, like
I have. But, all in all, the files are there. If I still haven’t
found “Sam” at this point, I can wait until the e-mails are
all converted to a Word or text file and search the document with Ctrl
+ F. (They were in there, by the way!)
One final
note: With all the stuff you’ve found in your search, it
might also have occurred to you that there are some files you really want,
but are gone. I’m sure you’ve heard by now that deleted files
don’t just disappear, they get relegated to some far corner of your
PC until they are overwritten. It’s sort of like if you have a CD
ROM of embarrassing pictures you can’t stand, but your kids think
are hilarious. You can’t just throw it away and hope they don’t
find it before the trash pick-up day. You need to drive over it with your
car a few times until it’s broken into small pieces!
If you find a file
of old e-mails or other items you want to be truly gone, you will need
to ensure that it gets overwritten multiple times. If that's what you're
looking for, check out this Web
site. A program called Scar 5 will overwrite your
specified files about 25 times. It’s pretty near impossible to recover
them after that! Do use this with caution, however. This is a case where
you need to be very specific, because carelessness here could wipe out
your hard drive.
My daughter was safe
and sound on the bus she was supposed to be on. (The driver just hadn’t
seen her). She didn’t drop off the face of the earth and neither
did your files or e-mails. We found the Excel file at my job by doing
a search for all Excel files and it tuned up in a folder with some name
none of us had ever heard of before!
When you do download
or save files, it pays to really pay attention where you are putting them.
Downloads often wind up in temporary folders, which you can track down
by searching files with “Temp*.*”, but it's good to be a little
more specific. You can also practice by trying to find all the pictures
on your PC sometime by using the File Type drop down for JPEGs. Just a
thought.
Happy computing!
~ Lisa Shaw
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