Microsoft Word Document has 'gone back in time' and denies any work has taken place since yesterday despite saves?

Question

Firstly, this is not an issue associated with trying to find a file when it has been overwritten. Nor is it one where the file has been accidentally deleted. The gist of the problem is that my document appears to have reverted to an older version, a version from 13 hours before I saved it.

An error message that consistently appeared throughout my write-up (even when it was saving correctly in the few weeks i have been working on this document) was this: error. (i should clarify that I am the only one working on this file so I'm unsure what other updates are conflicting).

Here is a brief overview of events:

30/11/17 15:45 - I saved the document (that was displaying the error, but saved fine anyway) and made a quick copy 'just in case'. Past this point, no saving seemed to take place.

30/11/17 21:00 - the document is reopened and consistently worked on until

1/12/17 04:00 - 7 hours later, the document is saved and closed.

1/12/17 17:00 - the document is opened, but appearing to have been reset to 15:45 30/11/17, when the copy was made.

There is no trace of another version nor automatic backup or any previous versions to go to at all, even though Word tells me auto save is on (all the different possible locations have been checked).

I have searched my whole PC for .asd files, but to no joy.

I was connected to Onedrive the whole time and assumed it was being saved in the cloud, but upon checking it appears the online version has also reverted to the old version.

I've also performed a full scan with Recuva on the off chance the more recent version of the document had been accidentally deleted, but no word files were returned.

As far as I can tell, this is a unique and very frustrating issue with Word. I'm really not sure what to do, having lost 7 hours of work with no explaination or even a shred of evidence that I did any work that night is extremely disheartening. I would like to think the file has just been saved somewhere stupid, but it appears to just be the same file gone back in time.

My version is Word Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus Version 1710 Build 8625.2127

Answer 1

I would immediately open a support ticket with OneDrive - they might be able to help you; they do backups of course so it might be possible to retrieve a backup from around the 04:00 mark, or between that and 17:00.

As far as cause - when you 'save' I believe OneDrive now 'seems' to save it, but then a background process moves it to the cloud. It sort of depends on the circumstances (if you are connected to a network, etc).

Do you have any other programms running on your PC that might be opening the files apart from Recuva? If they are opening the file, the OneDrive uploader might have though that was a change, and interrupted the sync process.

Honestly, I'm hoping someone will read my answer and say "No, that's not true, go here xxxx and recover the document!" Sometimes it's easier to adjust and/or correct than to come up with an answer.

It's heartbreaking to lose work. It's one thing I always tell my developers - data loss is absolutely unacceptable. If you can't save something, save it in a different place and show an error, etc. That doesn't help you right now though :(

When I get the 'can't save' error I immediately save to a new file name. I usually append a version on the end of the document, "MyDoc-2.docx" for example. I've seen some documents stuck that won't upload and I've done that to get them back in sync with the cloud version. That may help going forward.