HELP! Accidently Replaced old file with a new file with the same name, saved newfile over oldfile of same name

Question

Please somebody help me, I accidently saved a new document (wordpad or notepad) over an old document that had the same name. What I mean is , I went to save a document/file by clicking "save as", then since I accidently wrote a name/title for the document, that just happened to be the exact same name/title of another document on my hardrive , then I got the message that said "This document already exists do you want to replace it?" And like a moron I clicked "Yes" without thinking, and now I can't bring up the old document that had the same name/title.

Is there a way to restore this old document of the same name? System restore doesn't do it.

Answer 1

If you opened it with Word, OpenOffice, or something, you may be able to recover a temp file from when it was opened prior to saving over it. If you only ever opened in in notepad or wordpad, I don't think there's anything you can do short of hiring a data recovery expert, but that would be expensive and he probably wouldn't find it, since windows likes to quickly overwrite any available space. You can try using http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundele... and checking your temp folder for temp files.

If you have Vista, it apparently has a feature (as opposed to "feature") called Shadow Copy that can recover deleted or saved over files. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows...

Answer 2

Sorry, you will not be able to retrieve the old file. It has been written over.

That's it!