Okay... you guys are my last hope, i'm in such a bad situation at the moment so I apolgize if i'm abit anxious.

About an hour ago I was finishing up on a very very important piece of coursework. I'm not entirely sure what happened, but I was saving it from my usb when it said there's an error. At the top of word the title had changed into something that looked like this 'WRL~2300589' (the numbers weren't the same, just giving an example as it was so quick I didnt have a chance to write the actual numbers down) but then changed again into 'rescued'. The file then shut and I took my usb out, when i looked back on my usb, the file was gone. So I searched for 'rescued' and a file came up in notebook form. I opened it and was horrified to see that all my work had turned into question marks and squares and other such random symbols. I could recognize patches of my work, but out of 20 pages barely a paragraph was recognizable. I'm so confused and kinda terrified, I really need that work back, I've been searching for similar cases on the net but I haven't been able to find a suitable cure.

Please, can someone help me?

Thank you

What is the file extension?

Have you tried opening it in Word?

I've tried opening it in word, it has more page than the notebook form but its still all in those bizarre symbols. I don't know the file extension, sorry

The symbols simply indicate that your computer does not recognize the font.

What is the exact name of the file?

The three letters after the dot are the extension e.g. project.pdf is a pdf file.

Oh I see.

Rescued document.txt

I hope this is it?

Go to windows explorer. Find the file: select properties.

The Type will say ".txt": change that ending to .Doc

When I said it was Rescued document.txt, on a program it said it. In windows explorer its simply rescued document and when I select its properties it doesn't allow me to change the type, it only lets me chose how to open the document.

What version of Word do you have? Were you composing this on your computer?

Are you saying there is no file extension? Run a search for rescued document and see what comes up.

Also can try to open the file as follows:


Run MS-Word and choose open file. Select your file, and on the open button
select the small arrow (dropdown) and select open and repair.

I'm running the 2002 version of Word, and yes I was writing this on my computer. The file is in my C drive and its 'type' is 'text document' but it doesn't have .txt after it and it isnt let me change it when I go onto its properties.

The open repair didnt work =(

Was not the computer making auto saves?

If you encountered the error while saving then first check for temp files in
the same folder the document was stored in. When Word saves a file a temp
file is created, the original is deleted, and the temp file is renamed to
take the original's place. If it crashed at just the right point then the
temp file could still be available containing the entire contents of your
document.

In other words is it a .tmp file?

Every file has to have a type/extension.