Viewing source file for thumbnails.

Hello all,
I have what I consider to be a rather unique situation. I have recently been trying to restore an old, uncropped version of a file from about 10 years and about 3 computers ago, naturally impossible under general circumstances. However, the thumbnail for the file still shows the original version, while opening the image in windows media viewer or ms paint reveals that the file in fact contains the new version.

My query was since the thumbnail seems to be saving the original non-cropped version, has it kept a copy of the old file? If so, can the old version be opened so I can view it? I lack information about thumbnails to know whether this is possible or impossible.

Thanks for any assistance.

You would need a copy of the original file. A thumbnail is just a smaller version and does not contain this file. The best you could do is resize the image to whatever size is needed but the quality of the image would suffer.