I updated my attachment from outlook… where is it!

December 15, 2010   /   by Marco  / Categories :  Business

Have you ever opened an Outlook attachment, updated the file, hit the save button and then closed it without realising where the file was saved? Well this happened to my college today and he spent several hours trying to search for the document on the hard disk and couldn’t find it.

He searched everywhere both manually using explorer and also using the search function. Both methods failed and he was pulling his hair out because he couldn’t remember and recall what was updated.

Having been in this situation in the past I was able to provide some guidance and thought I’d share this with the rest of the world. I think there may be already solutions published on the Internet but thought I would use some of my old it skills to resolve this problem without relying on the Internet. So this is what I did:

  • Download a toll called process monitor from sysinternals – this is a great tool to use for checking what system processes are being used on the Windows OS. This includes memory, disk and networking services.
  • Run the program and then open up the attachment from Outlook.
  • In the program stop the monitoring and then click on the filter function. Search for the filename you opened and it should tell you where the file was saved. In my particular case it was C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.Outlook\[strange folder name]
  • Close the program as you will no longer need it.
  • The trick is that windows explorer doesn’t allow you to browse to this folder as its hidden. So you will need to run the DOS command – click start run in Windows and type cmd. Once you are the command prompt type cd [the path you found above].
  • Once you are in this folder issue copy [filename] c:
  • This command will copy files to the root of c drive.
  • Now open the file and check that it was updated.

Hopefully this post will help someone trying to recover their lost document.

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