Word files utterly VANISHING :-((

Copper Contributor

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!!!

3 Replies

@JoeStrike 

 

Are you usually saving your documents locally on the computer or to some "cloud" storage (such as OneDrive)?

I save them in a Dropbox folder in my computer which automatically syncs documents to my in-the-cloud Dropbox storage - so when something vanishes in my computer, it likewise vanishes in the cloud.
This is the other problem I mentioned: last night after (I thought) I saved a new document, a blank document was saved with that name, while what was supposed to be its contents were still sitting onscreen as an-inprogress untitled document. This happens randomly, so now I have to double-check after I save anything to confirm it was saved in fact, and print it out in case the document vanishes afterwards.

@JoeStrike 

 

Sorry, I have no experience using Dropbox with Office. Maybe Dropbox support can offer some best practices when used with Microsoft Office (https://www.dropbox.com/support)?