Windows question...

[usernamenumber]

...for a friend, not for me. ;)

She opened a doc from gmail using IE, edited it, and then clicked Save (not Save As) and for unrelated reasonslater rebooted. Now the doc doesn't show up in her Recent Documents list, and she can't find it anywhere on the system, even when she searches for *.doc and sorts by date. Does IE store files in a way that obscures the extension, and even if so, where do they get stored by default?

This is a really important grad school application, so if anyone can offer advice, it would be greatly appreciated.

Comments

hrm...

[turtletoturtle]

Maybe search for .docx if she has a later version of Office?

[bronzite.livejournal.com]

The exact path will change from Windows 98 to Windows 7, but temporary files should be stored in %appdata%\..\Local\Temp. If the file still lives, it'll be there. Sort by last modified.

[marphod.livejournal.com]

What version of Windows?

First, make sure you're really searching the hard drive, and not using "Windows Search", which while is smarter, blissfully ignores temporary and cache directories, system directories, or anything it doesn't think is worthy.

Use "Search Companion" (the old search), and make sure you change options so it actually looks everywhere.


Second, try using her Internet Settings. Internet Properties->General->Browsing History 'Settings'. 'View Files' and see if the file is in the temporary internet file location. Also, take a look at the Disk Space allotted; if it is too low, the file might have gotten purged.

If I have any other ideas, I'll add them.

[how-low-am-i.livejournal.com]

shogunhb figured it out :)

[how-low-am-i.livejournal.com]

THANKS SO SO MUCH BRAD!

[laurion]

Far too late to be of use, but yeah. Almost every browser that 'opens' files directly is dropping it into the cache, and the opening application will happily save to that location too.

I think OS should make such cache folders only writable by the app that owns the cache, so that such mistakes are impossible to make, as then Word would not let you save a file to a temporary folder...

This one bites my faculty -all- the time. At least with other browsers they don't tie in to Office, so you actually download the file to a non-cache location before opening it.