One of our documents is missing

There are many ways you can lose computer documents.

You can delete them accidentally. Maybe this happens when your fingers slip and you click the wrong mouse button.

An application crashes. Today's software is more robust than in the past, yet things can still fail, sending your last hour's work to electronic oblivion.

Occasionally catastrophic hardware failures trash data. A spectacular major document disaster happened when a fuse blew.

In most cases, recovering recently lost files is straightforward. You might not  get everything back, but you can limit the damage.

Your first line of defence for lost documents may be simple. After staring open-mouthed at a suddenly blank screen, you can magically restore everything in an instant by pressing Control-Z. This is the standard Undo command. It also repairs software stuff-ups.

Many applications have built-in recovery tools. Microsoft Word takea a snapshot of your document every ten minutes. If things go wrong, you'll only have a little catching-up to do.

When Word restarts after a crash, you'll see one or more saved versions of the document. You can save this file and continue working.

If you're nervous about your work, change the auto-recovery setting to, say, automatic back-ups every five minutes.

If you use Microsoft Windows the Recycle Bin is a helpful backstop. Apple computers also have a bin. Instead of instant obliteration, deleted files are sent to the Recycle Bin where they sit in limbo. You can open the bin and recover any file. It is the most likely destination for any unexpectedly absent file.

Things get harder if you've emptied your Recycle Bin. The missing files are probably still on your hard drive – somewhere. However, they are not normally accessible. To get them back you need a undelete or file recovery application.

Commercial file recovery programs are often overkill for restoring the odd deleted document from a small office computer. PC Inspector (www.pcinspector.de) is one of the neatest free file recovery tools – be warned the website is in German but the English translations are good and the software can recover most lost documents in seconds.