Some notes when restoring Word documents

Network Administration - You will probably be worried when a document contains little or no important information that is corrupted. You may lose all that information after hours trying to retrieve that information without results. That may be because you are so worried that it is not possible to perform some simple but effective steps to get back this information.

Here are a few things you can apply in such situations:

1. Does your document really fail?

Many users often make the mistake of not opening the document because it is faulty, and some even after several attempts to fix it but have no results have "erased" it. You should remember that anything on your computer may fail, and in this situation your Word application or even Windows may have problems. So before you restore or edit the file, you should try opening other documents or opening the corrupted document on another machine to determine the cause of the problem. You may be surprised at what happens.

2. Backup error documents

Actually this is not a recovery procedure but it is an important step in the error correction process because we are not sure about the outcome of this process. In some cases, the error correction tool did not fix the problem and even made the problem worse. But with a previous copy, no matter how bad the result is.

3. Check email

In many cases, this error may have been attached to an email and sent by the email. If so, it is fortunate that the copy of that email (along with the attachment) has been stored in the Sent Items folder of the Email or Webmail application. And simply open the email and download the attachment.

4. Run CHKDSK

CHKDSK (or CheckDisk) is a command in Windows operating system, OS and OS / 2 that show the file system integrity status of the hard disk and can fix system file logic errors, in Unix this command is fsck. You only need to run this command on the drive containing the error file because this error can occur because of a system error and CHKDSK can fix this error. After running CHKDSK you can check the integrity of the file system and determine where the problem occurred in the file system or inside this document.

5. Export the file in another format

If you can open this document in Word, try saving it in another format. Sometimes the use of a format like RTF or TXT may remove some of Word's code from this document. Usually these codes cause errors for Word documents.

6. Extract raw text

Although saving a Word document in RTF or TXT format is quite effective, it is in case you can reopen it in Word, but what if you can't open it? In that case you should use another word processor that supports Word documents. You can use a file editor (like Hex) to manually extract everything that can be fixed from this error document.

7. Use Word's text converter

You can also restore the text portion of a document with Word's text editor. To open this tool in File select Open , when the Open dialog box appears selecting the corrupted Word document. Then select Recover Text From Any File in the Files Of Type list and open this document. This filter will import ASCII text straight from any file. However, you will lose Word format and other non-text items such as images, but at least you will be able to extract most textual information from that file. Note that this method cannot be applied to documents in Word 97-2003 format (except docx or dotx files).

8. Use the Open And Repair feature

Word XP and later Word applications support the Open And Repair option that you can use to recover corrupted files. After opening the Open dialog box, simply click on the error file and select Open And Repair in the drop-down list of the Open button. This tool can fix many problems with error documents.

9. Use the Shadow Copy version of the error document in Windows Vista

Windows Vista automatically saves the Shadow Copy of some documents onto the hard drive. If a Shadow Copy version of this error document exists, you can restore a recent version of the document. To do so, right -click the error document and select Properties in the shortcut menu. When the Properties dialog box appears, select the Previous Versions tab (this tab only appears with files stored on NTFS formatted drives ). The Previous Versions tab will show the previous versions of this file.

10. Recreate the Header

Although every Word document is different, Word documents created in regular Word versions often have the same Header style (but there are a few differences in versions). Using a file editor to check for error-free Word documents will quickly discover the common points of these documents. After making sure that the Header is also in common, you just need to copy the Header from one document and use the above editor to paste in the corrupted file (overwrite the existing Header of the error file). If the Header is the broken part of the document, this method will fix the problem of this document.

11. Use a recovery program

Several current third-party applications are designed to recover error documents. Two of the most commonly used applications are OfficeRecovery and Ontrack Easy Recovery . But in fact the resilience of these applications depends on the level of data corruption.