Recovery .docx

Question

Data recovery

My friend had a problem - the .docx document with a fragment of the candidate's thesis stopped opening.
Unpacking with a zip and getting the text turns out, but it gives only 5-6 pages out of 70.
The most annoying thing is that there are no copies of the file and a friend worked directly from a flash drive (yes, she is a humanitarian!)
Is there a chance to recover the information - there are two weeks of archival work …

Answer 1

Microsoft support: Recovering a lost file in Word 2007 or Word 2003 - 6 methods are described there, from “I forgot where I saved it” to recovering from temporary files.
And yes, such an oversight is excusable (for the humanities) when preparing a term paper, but certainly not a dissertation ...

Answer 2

Make a full copy of the flash drive (using the dd command for example). In fact, an image. Further work with it and its copies - in order to avoid.
If not the entire archive is unpacked, try treating it with archive healers. If it doesn't help, try to find the lost chains/clusters on the disk, for example, using fsck. For one, check the main copy of fat and the backup.

Answer 3

From experience, files often do not change, but are “written side by side”.
Therefore, if you run the flash drive through data recovery programs (for example, Easy Recovery, R-Studio, etc.), it is quite possible to find other versions of the document, maybe a little earlier.
If the flash drive is large, there is a lot of space, and the file is small - often you can restore the unbroken ones.
Good luck!
PS do not make any entries on the USB flash drive now!

Answer 4

even chkdsk