My wife has been working from home. The lost file was an e-mail attachment (vis hotmail). She has worked on it all day yesterday but was just saving rather than saving to a specific destination on her PC.

Searches are not finding the file. Is there any way of getting it back?

MTFU or WTFU will be met by a violent stabbing and wokking!

Open the application she was using it edit it and look in the File menu for recently opened docs ? Or "my recent documents" from the windows start button menu ?

Tried that. It only finds the original unedited email attachment.

Ah! As she probably now knows you really need to save attachments to a known location if you're going to edit them.

Hmmm. Like I said, she has access to knives and a wok so i'm not about to point out that she screwed up.

Have you used the Windows search function to search all files for some known content ? i.e. search for a word/phrase she knows is in the doc.

i'd say you probably need to run away then; the file she was working on would have been a temp file only and with it being webmail i'm 99.9% certain it'll be unrecoverable.

If she's hit save, then surely it has to be saved somewhere? How long do temporary files last for (silly question perhaps…)

Is it Start¦recent documents ?
If not, then she probably didn't save the file to the computer disk, and she needs to start again.

Repeat the operation she performed i.e. open a doc from webmail and then select "Save as" (but don't actually save) and see where the default folder location is. Then check all files in that folder.

windows would save it to a temp directory in the temporary internet files folder, but not with a recognisable file name. if a search for known content did not return the edited document, then the likelihood is that it's unrecoverable.

yep, doesn't it normally save it with a very weird name (so if you search for the document title you wouldn't find it?) What's your browser set up as, does it delete temporary files when you close it? (mine does, so I'd guess I'd be screwed in the same situation)…

Ta. It was saved last night and the computer cleared all temporary internet files when it was shut down.

Thanks for the help anyway. There will be some tears and 7 hours of furious typing.

You might want to search for all files created within the last day. Its a long shot but might work!

Try installing google desktop to search your computer. Works much better than windows search function for me.