Hey friends,

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I am a writer and I save all my documents to my PC as well as an external drive. Yesterday I made about 20 pages of progress on a document and continually saved it.

This morning I wanted to backup all my files, as I routinely do, so I copied them from my PC to my external hard drive and overwrote the files on my hard drive. But when I opened the document I worked on yesterday, it was almost entirely empty except for the header, which means all of yesterday’s progress was erased.

First I thought that maybe I’d forgotten to save one last time before closing the document, but then there would’ve only been a few paragraphs missing. So my next best guess was that - yesterday, while writing - I was accidentally saving the file to my external hard drive instead of my PC, and that, when I overwrote the file on the external hard drive, I basically reset my own progress.

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Is there a way to get that overwritten file back? I’ve looked at some guides, done the basic steps (right-click on the folder, look for security copy, there was none).

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Thank you! <3

  • Jeffbx@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Ugh that’s so frustrating - we’ve all been there (or will be there one day!)

    There’s unfortunately nothing you can do to recover it that you haven’t tried, but versioning is something important for situations like this. It won’t help you today, but it’ll prevent situations like this from happening again.

    If you use an automatic cloud sync - such as Dropbox or OneDrive - they will keep multiple versions of the file as you save it. So if you delete or overwrite the file entirely, you can just go to the web interface, go back a version or 2, and restore the document to a prior state.