Search link has lost the file it should link to

I worked most of today in Word on a critical document, saving the file every 10 minutes or so. I put the machine in hibernate and when I opened it back up to do more work, the file was not in the Word recent file list.

Did a search (from the Start icon) and the file, with the proper date and time showed up as a link (a magnifying glass with the shortcut arrow in the lower left). I cannot find a way to have the link icon open the file that I saved.

Is there anyway to retrieve a file that the OS knows was there, but appears to have lost the linkage?

maestrogn

Welcome to the Seven Forums!

Maybe you have already tried this, but open the Windows (File) Explorer and manually look around for the file that way. When you first open the Windows (File) Explorer, you should see the Documents library - look around in there.

Tried that but mystery remains

Thanks so much for the reply. Yes, we did search for the file in many ways (still getting used to the Win7 search facility). However, we could not find the .docx file that the links that did come up on the search showed.

My brilliant wife solved the immediate dilemma by noting that I'd been writing with Dragon Naturally Speaking so she searched for the last DRA file of that day. Buried within all the DNS data was all of the text -- it took a while, but I was able to reconstruct the entire paper from the DNS files.

That still leaves the question of how the docx file could disappear into cyberspace. I'll go on trying to learn to refine my searches so I can see if the computer saved any docx (or even doc) file on the date and time anywhere on the HD.

Any ideas would be much appreciated!

maestrogn

I don't let the Windows OS keep a list of recently opened documents and the same goes for each Office application. Not that I really care if such lists are created, but since I never got in the habit of using them, I just turn them off. One benefit of having those lists off is - searches only turn up the original document itself.

You might also want to tell Word to auto save every minute - then go check that the file is indeed where you think that it is using Windows (File) Explorer.

Thank you for the tips. I will consider them both.