# Solved: Word Doc suddenly 0 bytes



## Stephen_A (Mar 23, 2006)

I'd like to share a scary experience and also invite any explanations. Using Word 2002 (it works), XP, SP3, IBM Thinkpad. I just went to open a file I hadn't touched in a month and found it was 0 bytes. Even a blank document clocks in at 19.5 kb. 

I backup diligently but found both my external drive backups also had the 0kb file, as did my Dropbox and Idrive accounts. They had obviously 'assumed' the 0 byte transition was a new revision. 

Retrieved the text from a blog otherwise I'd have been screwed. Has anyone else had this experience?

Stephen.


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## Keebellah (Mar 27, 2008)

Nope, I just think that the document was opened, all contents selected, deleted and saved under the same name, result 0 Byte.

The Ms Office overhead always leaves some extra bytes but I think this is the most logical explanation and when backing up, if the name is the same the latest version overwrites the older one, and the newer one was empy.


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## Stephen_A (Mar 23, 2006)

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply, Hans. I would hate to think that I would delete everything from this important document and save it; moreover the 'Title' and 'Comments' fields in 'Properties' were also blanked out. Seems the file somehow became corrupted, even though I'm pretty vigorous with my anti virus protection.


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## slurpee55 (Oct 20, 2004)

Sadly, while file corruption can have to do with a virus, it more often doesn't, at least in my experience. Far more common causes of a corrupt file are power outages, damage to file sectors of your hard drive or a temporary glitch in the program (one that, for unknown reasons, usually goes away after a reboot). If it is just the one file, I would suspect the latter.


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## Keebellah (Mar 27, 2008)

I agree with Surpee, I was about to post a similar answer.
Just a typical situation of Murphy passing by


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## Stephen_A (Mar 23, 2006)

Thank you everyone for your thoughtful responses. I think that cleared it up.


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