How can I find and recover Excel files that are missing after blue screen of death?

[frustrateduser710]

Hi -- I got the blue screen of death last night (Jan 27) and today I cannot find several Excel files that were open at the time of the crash. I had saved them all previously many times over the past several days. In fact, though I saved several different Excel files each of the last few days, there do not appear to be any Excel files on my computer saved since Jan21. Are the files gone forever? I've checked the Auto Recover feature and have done a search on xls, xlsx and the name of one of my missing files. I've tried to rename .tmp files. No luck so far. Thanks for your help!

 

[ronintexas]

Excel doesn't always auto-save the files....Although the saved files missing is an interesting twist....have tried the open recent items?

 

[johnbl]

you might look here: http://superuser.com/questions/22564/recovering-excel-documents-that-were-closed-without-saving

I think the directory is hidden by default you need to make file explorer show them
by default: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/show-hidden-files#show-hidden-files=windows-7

 

[frustrateduser710]

Excel doesn't always auto-save the files....Although the saved files missing is an interesting twist....have tried the open recent items?

Yes. Have looked at recent documents, and the files are not there.

 

[caraiman]

Try in C:\Users\(YourUserName)\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Excel\

 

[hang-the-9]

Hi -- I got the blue screen of death last night (Jan 27) and today I cannot find several Excel files that were open at the time of the crash. I had saved them all previously many times over the past several days. In fact, though I saved several different Excel files each of the last few days, there do not appear to be any Excel files on my computer saved since Jan21. Are the files gone forever? I've checked the Auto Recover feature and have done a search on xls, xlsx and the name of one of my missing files. I've tried to rename .tmp files. No luck so far. Thanks for your help!

Where those files by any chance opened directly from an email?

 

[frustrateduser710]

Hi -- I got the blue screen of death last night (Jan 27) and today I cannot find several Excel files that were open at the time of the crash. I had saved them all previously many times over the past several days. In fact, though I saved several different Excel files each of the last few days, there do not appear to be any Excel files on my computer saved since Jan21. Are the files gone forever? I've checked the Auto Recover feature and have done a search on xls, xlsx and the name of one of my missing files. I've tried to rename .tmp files. No luck so far. Thanks for your help!

Where those files by any chance opened directly from an email?

No. They were files I had been working on over the course of several days and were saved to my local hard drive. The file I care most about was an Excel file with many tabs that I had been working on for several consecutive days and saved probably multiple times each day -- unfortunately with the same file name. When the crash happened, i had multiple files/windows open not just in Excel but also in Chrome, Word, and probably PPT.

Guess I need to have a better file back up plan!

 

[hang-the-9]

Hi -- I got the blue screen of death last night (Jan 27) and today I cannot find several Excel files that were open at the time of the crash. I had saved them all previously many times over the past several days. In fact, though I saved several different Excel files each of the last few days, there do not appear to be any Excel files on my computer saved since Jan21. Are the files gone forever? I've checked the Auto Recover feature and have done a search on xls, xlsx and the name of one of my missing files. I've tried to rename .tmp files. No luck so far. Thanks for your help!

Where those files by any chance opened directly from an email?

No. They were files I had been working on over the course of several days and were saved to my local hard drive. The file I care most about was an Excel file with many tabs that I had been working on for several consecutive days and saved probably multiple times each day -- unfortunately with the same file name. When the crash happened, i had multiple files/windows open not just in Excel but also in Chrome, Word, and probably PPT.

Guess I need to have a better file back up plan!

Did you look for the autorecover files manually? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316951 there is a step in there on how to find them. I just recovered a document this way after a crash by poining the autorecover feature directly to that file. Oddly it only worked when I did that in the original location, if I copied the asd file to a different place and then tried to opne it, it would not.