When she returned to the desktop after restart, one of her documents was gone. She searched everywhere, according to her, but couldn't find it. I went over there yesterday to do a search, and when looking for the file, there was one error message saying a document with the same name was already open and the autosave doc couldn't be recovered.
My mom had re-downloaded the doc from June 1 from email (unedited version) and had it open. I renamed that one and the search turned up nothing.
The autosave cache revealed no such document. She did check the document I renamed but it was the unedited version.
If she got the doc in email and edited it from email, the most logical conclusion is this:
She received the doc in email. She clicked on it in her email. It opened in Word. She edited it. She hit Save, not Save As. It saved the document into a temporary folder, because it was opened from her email.
She restarted. The temporary folder was cleared out; the contents of some temp folders get wiped when the computer restarts. She looked for the file. She could not find it.
She downloaded it again. She clicked on it again. Now she just wiped the autosave version as well, because when you edit a file with a certain name, it will overwrite autosave files of the same name.
Had she not opened the file directly from email and then just hit Save rather than Save As, she would have been fine. Had she restarted, then looked for the autosave version of the file when she realized the original was gone, she would have been fine. By saving the file to the email temporary folder, then re-downloading it and re-opening it, she wiped the version she saved and the autosave version.
The moral: ALWAYS know where you are saving your files to!
