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Unreadable word documents


Vikingo

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Hello, after using Recuva all of my important MS-Word documents came back with weird characters, squares,numbers and letters but all of the megabytes are there. These documents were never deleted, I just used Recuva to gather everything from the hard-drive in on place and the images came back perfect but not the MS Office 2003 documents.

What could I have done wrong and how can I recover my precious word files?

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I've probably missed something here....

but if the Word documents were never deleted, why are you trying to open the recovered ones?

can't you just open the original, non-recovered, ones?

Backup now & backup often.
It's your digital life - protect it with a backup.
Three things are certain; Birth, Death and loss of data. You control the last.

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Thanks for responding, very kind of you. My word documents were scattered all over the hard-drive and in different archives, the same with hundreds of family images, about 10 years or more of having been very disorganized. I wasn't looking for deleted files, I had this brainstorm of using Recuva to collect everything into one place where I can sort them out and delete the doubles. That worked great on my images but the word documents came back unreadable in a weird code like. Unfortunately I didn't think of backing up my files. When I do open one of those word files I get the window 'Archive Conversion' but no matter which codification I select the file does not appear in any language but in different numbers, letters and every strange symbol on the keyboard. I do get two readable phrases though: Next Page and Next Column. The actual text is in code, I believe that's what it's called. I am up in age, soon to be 78, so this has been a real challenge so far. I spent weeks on google, hoping someone had a similar problem but to no avail.

I couldn't find the original files anywhere after they went through the Recuva mil and since I had to reformat that particular hard-drive recently I imagine they are gone for good.

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just to get a handle on your situation.

the files that have been recovered are on a hard drive that was reformatted (in the recent past)?

and it sounds like the recovered files came FROM this drive and have been recovered TO this drive?

 

if so, recovery chances would have gone from 'maybe' to 'unlikely'.

recovery at the best of times can be problematic, but in a drive that has been formatted and in use makes it that much more unlikely.

 

sadly what you are seeing may simply be 'it is what it is', those Word files are gone.

 

BUT.... often when Word shows those squares and weird characters like you describe, it can be from using Word to open a non-Word file, for example, the PDF file extension has gotten wrongly associated with Word and when you double click a PDF to open it, Word is used instead of Adobe.

 

so, just checking, are the Word files you are trying to open REALLY Word files?

Backup now & backup often.
It's your digital life - protect it with a backup.
Three things are certain; Birth, Death and loss of data. You control the last.

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