From the course: Help Yourself: Tech Tips Weekly

Locating a lost file

- [Instructor] Where the lost file went isn't as important as getting it back. And how you look for that lost file depends on what you know about losing it. To start looking for a lost file you just created, open the program where the file was created. Here in Microsoft Word, I'm gonna click the File tab and choose Open, which is selected for me automatically. And you see a list of recently opened files. If you see the missing file, choose it from the list. Now, for Office 365, if you'd rather find where the file is hidden, you can right click on the entry and choose Open File Location and the folder window appears, showing you where the file dwells. With this version of Word, you can copy the path to the clipboard. Press the Windows and E keyboard shortcut to bring up a File Explorer window and paste the address in the address box in order to view that folder. And I'm gonna edit off the file name here. Press Enter. And there's the folder and the file. Files you just saved don't appear in the Open File list, so instead in the same application that created the file, check the Save As dialog box. Here in Word, I'll choose Save As and then click the Browse button. Here you see the current folder in which the program is saving files. This is the folder in which you should look to find your lost files. When these methods fail, you must use Windows Search to locate the file. Press Windows and E, the Windows + E keyboard shortcut to bring up a File Explorer window and navigate to your account's folder. My account name on this computer is Dan Gookin. Here's my folder. Now, I'm going to type the missing file name into this search box. Windows locates any files with a matching name. From the list you can right-click the matching file name and choose Open File Location to see where it roosts. Now, if this trick doesn't work, or you don't know the file's name, you can think of when you created it. Again, use the search box in your account's folder. From the search tool's search tab, choose Date Modified and you can select whether the file was created today, yesterday, or last week. Choose one of those items to see a list of recently created files. You should be able to find it somewhere in this list. If the file still can't be located, you can search for it in the Recycle Bin, or you can use the Windows File History Backup and Restore program to see if you can locate your lost file.

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