How To Find A Lost File

If you’ve been using computers for years, you might have had an issue finding a lost file. You probably have thousands of files stored “somewhere” in your computer. When you can’t find a lost file, what do you do? Now, I’m not talking about deleted files or data recovery. That’s a totally different problem. *

Windows:

The easiest way to find a file on your Windows machine is to type in the search menu at the bottom left of the menu bar. You can type anything you can remember about the file here; the title, if you can remember it, or even a word you remember using in the file.

Alternate Windows Method:

Another way to find a file in a Windows machine is to Press the Windows key with the E key to open the Windows Explorer. This will open a directory of all the files you’ve saved. With this method, however, you do need to remember what folder or Directory the file is saved in.

If you can’t find your file using either of these two methods, it may have been stored in your OneDrive account. (We don’t want to think about deleted files or Data Recovery yet!)

OneDrive Files:

If you have any Microsoft Office programs, it sometimes likes to save your documents on OneDrive, rather than the hard drive on your computer. When I catch it in the act, I’ll “Save As” and resave it into a known folder on my computer. If you’ve searched on your computer and can’t find the lost file, and you know it is an Office file (Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc.), you’ll need to log into OneDrive and use the search box to find your OneDrive files. Similar to the Windows search box, you can enter any key word you can remember from that particular file, and it should pull it up for you.

Example:

As a test, I tried all three methods to find a lost file using one word: LEMON.

• Using Windows search on the Menu Bar, it found several files with the word “lemon” in the title or the body of the documents.
• Using Windows Explorer, it found nothing until I searched inside my Recipe Folder. If I had been looking for a document about a car or appliance being a lemon, it would have been much more difficult to find the correct file.
• With OneDrive, it found some smoothie recipes that I had accidently stored in OneDrive.

* Deleted Files:

For deleted files, check your trash bin. If you haven’t emptied it in a while the lost file may still be there. If it’s not there, give Chris a call to see if he has any suggestions for retrieving it.

If your hard drive or SSD has crashed, we recommend sending it to DriveSavers for data recovery. Use the Geek For Hire code (DS24016) for discounts on Data Recovery and other benefits from them.

Conclusion: 

What issues are you having that you don’t want to ask your kids or grandkids to explain to you? Send me an email and I’ll try to address that in another post!