Recover or Repair?
So will you need a file recovery tool or a file repair utility? Let’s look at some typical scenarios.
1. Let’s say you have a document named “MyDocument1.doc”. When trying to open that document with Microsoft Word, you receive a message telling you the file is corrupted and prompting whether you’d like to repair the file. When you agree to attempt the repair, the program crashes or throws out an error message.
If this is the case, you’ll need a file repair tool such as RS File Repair. RS File Repair can fix many files that Office built-in file repair tools cannot.
2. Now let’s make things slightly more complicated. Let’s say you used to have a file named “MyDocument2.doc”, but accidentally deleted the document and cleaned the Recycle Bin (or deleted the file with Shift+Del so it never got to the Recycle Bin in the first place).
If this is your case, then use a file recovery tool such as RS File Recovery. Alternatively, you can use one of the dedicated recovery tools handling Microsoft Office files such as RS Office Recovery or RS Word Recovery. Either way, if you use one of those tools in a proper way (e.g. downloading and installing the file recovery tool onto a different disk or alternate storage device) fairly soon, most probably you won’t need to use a file repair tool afterwards.
3. Now, what if you now want to recover a file named “MyDocument3.doc” that was deleted a week ago? In this case, there is a high chance that some parts of the file have been already overwritten with data that belongs to other files. If you try using a file recovery tool such as RS File Recovery alone, you’ll get that file recovered, but you won’t be able to open it in Microsoft Word (you’ll see an error message). If you attempt to use one of the dedicated recovery tools handling Microsoft Office files such as RS Office Recovery or RS Word Recovery, you won’t see that file at all, as these tools will check the file for consistency and simply refuse to add it onto the list of recoverable files.
In this case, your best bet is using two tools together. First, use a file recovery tool such as RS File Recovery to recover the file. Then, use a file repair utility such as RS File Repair to fix it up.