Word files utterly VANISHING :-((
This has been going on for a while and is driving me more and more NUTS:
Many of my Document folders are suddenly EMPTY for no reason - I've never emptied them, their contents should be there. These are mostly older folders I hadn't gone to for a while.
Now this past weekend, two new documents I'd been working on were no longer there when I reopened Word later in the day or the next morning. The first one wasn't that far along, but I'd spent SEVERAL hours on the other one yesterday, but this morning...no longer there.
Here's another issue that happened fairly regularly in the past months, but not lately: When I wanted to create a new document from an old one, “Save As” would occasionally create an EMPTY document (0 kb) with that name, while what I've been updating is stored under its original name, meaning my original document no longer exists in its original form.
The same thing would happen while creating a brand new document: a named but empty document is created, while the document I was writing stays untitled (I lost a few documents by closing the untitled one thinking it had been saved.) In both cases the empty documents would still have the names I thought I'd saved them as...whereas in the problem I'm currently having, what I thought I'd saved don't even leave a named but empty document behind - as if they never existed to begin with.
I've tried Recover Documents, looked in the Recycle bin, Show hidden folders/documents...nada. I'm about to throw this PC out the window in sheer frustration if I can't trust it to keep my work. (I have ES/ET anti-virus and it's never found anything that might cause this. SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP ME!!!