Aged Cyber Aunt

How to: Recover a document lost under Windows 95/98/ME

What do you do when the great work is nearly finished, you haven't saved for a while, and the PC hangs, goes down, curls up its toes? A friend rang with this problem, and he had to re-boot the PC. Sometimes a word processing program will look for the file it was working on before it crashed and recover it that way. What it does is look for the .tmp file it was working on. If it does not do this automatically you can do this manually.

Normally when you are working on a file the program makes a .tmp copy in the c:/Windows/Temp directory - when you leave the file, having saved it, the program deletes the relevant .tmp file. If this is not the case, the user can go do it manually. First you need to open Windows Explorer by going to the Start Button and pressing right click with the mouse. Go to the Windows/Temp directory and right click the right window. Up will come a menu, choose Arrange icons, by date. This will sort them in descending order. Choose the most likely .tmp file and load it into the work processor, or whatever program you used to create it. With any luck, the last thing you did will pop up and all you have to do is save it.

Aged Cyber Aunt Index Page

Updated 15 January 2004