How can I recover a deleted docx file?
Solution 1:
STOP! Have you been doing all of these things to the drive itself, or to a cloned copy of the drive? If the former, it may already be too late. If the latter, good. As you have had no luck with data recovery software, it may be time to use a professional data recovery service. This will only be worthwhile if the document is worth at least several hundred dollars to you, however.
There are other options. You could do a scan of the drive itself in Linux, for example, but it is very likely that any decent data recovery software has already done this.
You may also wish to consider regular backups from now on.
Solution 2:
- Upload your .docx document to Google Drive.
- Right-click on the .docx document and select Open with -> Google Docs. Google Docs will convert the .docx file to its own document format for editing in Google Docs.
- From the open document in Google Docs select File -> Download as -> Microsoft Word (.docx). Google Docs will convert the document back to .docx format.
- Open the .docx document that you downloaded from Google Docs in a Microsoft Word or any other word processor that supports the .docx format.
Google Docs does a good job of converting documents to .docx format. The two document conversions in Google Docs may remove whatever there is in your original .docx document that was causing the problem.
Alternate method
Make a copy of the .docx document that you want to recover and rename the copied document's extension to .zip.
docx documents are zipped XML files. Extract the document.xml file in the word folder and the images from the media folder which is a subfolder of the word folder.
Open the document.xml file in a text editor and recover as much of the text as you can. The document.xml file may also contain some of the original document's formatting information, which can also be recovered. If the document.xml contains any formatting information, the best way to view it is by opening document.xml in a web browser.
Sometimes you can also recover a .docx document by creating a blank .docx document, renaming its extension to .zip, and replacing the document.xml file of the blank .docx document with the document.xml file which was extracted from the document that you want to recover.