I just accidently deleted a weeks worth of Powerpoint slides from a presentation I was working on. I meant to delete all but one and save it as a new file, but instead of clicking “save as”, I clicked “save”. I can’t “undo”.
Am I screwed??? Is there any way of getting my original document back???
Shit, shit, shit!
Got any backups (network, tape)? You could restore from those.
(Obvious, but I always forget the obvious when I’m in panic mode.)
The agony of Delete!
IIRC you’re fubar buddy.
I did something like this with a photo restoral job. I was showing my friend (with a finished client file) some of the fun things you could do in photoshop. I accidentally saved a picture of someones dead grandfather fishing with the fish blown up to double size.
I spent an hour or so reblending a new fish from a fresh scan back into the original. I told the client about it and he actually asked if he could buy a copy of the “fish story” version as well. So it had a happy ending but I was kicking myself the whole time I was fixing the original.
You might be able to check out your temp files and see if it autosaved sometime before you saved the file. The temp file may have been automatically deleted, though. I’d search your hardrive for all known .ppt files and check them out just in case.
I’m hosed.
Nope…no back up, nothing in temp files. Searched all .ppt and the only one is the revised one I accidently saved.
But thanks for the suggestions so far.
IAAPD.*
Unfortunately, PowerPoint does not create a valid stored temp file while you’re working that’s anything more than a pointer to the stored memory cache, so you won’t find any temp files that you can physically open back in PPT.
You also won’t find an earlier version of the autosaved file anywhere as an existing PPT file - the autosave feature only works if PowerPoint crashed due to a power failure or some other form of interrupt - it doesn’t create a PPT file anywhere other than a cached tmp file pointing to stored memory.
In the future, when you’ve realized you’ve done something like this, you may try and immediately reboot the machine, and hope that the resave didn’t complete before the interrupt, in which case PPT would open the recovered file in its reverted state, but that wouldn’t help you this time. I wish we had an option like that, but for performance / storage reasons we can’t create a full, valid tmp file of an existing PPT file.
[sub]*I am a PowerPoint Developer[/sub]
rundogrun, welcome to the group of people who do frequent backups! All of us in this little clan have a story similar to yours (or much worse).
Thanks again everybody.
Luckily I had a printed version, and since most of today was a travel day, I was able to recreate everything.
Live and learn…