Google Desktop to the rescue

I was working in Word 2003 this morning on a white paper and wanted to create an outline. I deleted the body text between headings and THOUGHT I had saved the file as a new file. To my horror, I realized that I had saved over the original file. I frantically searched for .tmp files, backup files, the clipboard text in case I had copied some text, but the sinking feeling in my gut was the realization that I had truly written over the file with no hope for recovery. (I didn’t have the magical Save AutoRecover info every option (on the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Save tab) selected as I learned on this Microsoft KnowledgeBase article.)

I’m not the first to sing the praises of Google Desktop here on talk.bmc.com, but today I discovered a great new use of the tool! In looking for pieces of my text using Google Desktop, I found that Google Desktop had cached versions of the Word file stored about every 10 minutes! So I clicked the Cached link with fingers crossed, and lo and behold, there was the text of my document. I quickly copied and pasted it into a new Word doc and heaved a sigh of relief (or was it a shout of victory? Ask my hallmates.)

Nothing left to say but WHEW.

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