Recovering overwritten file! Help!

[Warwick]

I am writing a novel for a game company. I have used Open Office for a year now and love it. Late Friday night I finished a bout of writing and saved as normal. I am working from a file on a jump drive because I move between comptuers. Then I did a back up by using Windows Explorer to copy the file from the jump drive to the internal hard drive of my laptop. I've done this a thousand times. This time something went wrong. The files got reversed. I saved a week-old file over the newest novel file. It's 80 pages lost! I haven't shut down the computer or saved anything else to the jump drive. I have opened the file again to make certain it did, in fact, save over a week's worth of writing, and it did, but not saved it again. I've done all kinds of searching and can't find any kind of backup or temp copy file. Is there any way to recover this file or am I screwed?

[Cambirder]

Have a look in your user backup folder, although if backup is not on then I'm afraid you may have lost those 80 pages.

You should find it here.

\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\OpenOffice.org\3\user\Backup

[RoryOF]

If you can remember a distinctive word used in your last 80 pages, you could search all files for a file containing that word. This will be slow, but it might find something.

[atdrummin]

Hi - Is there a mac version of finding accidentally overwritten files?

Also, will this work if I've already shut down the computer?

Thanks!