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I have Windows excel on my MacBook Pro. I accidentally saved one Excel file overtop another excel file. Is there anyway to recover the earlier file (the one I just saved over)?

kenorb
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Greg McF.
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    And you don't have any backup of that file, copy in your Time Machine or some previous version of this file somewhere else or in Trash? In most cases you can say bye-bye to removed/overridden files. – kenorb May 20 '15 at 14:04
  • Related: http://superuser.com/questions/174719/how-to-recover-deleted-files-in-mac-os-x, http://superuser.com/questions/465185/recovering-deleted-files-after-emptying-trash-on-os-x-lion, http://superuser.com/questions/191867/recover-text-file-deleted-from-trash-on-mac-os-x, http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/48200/recovered-deleted-files-on-mac-by-command-line – kenorb May 20 '15 at 14:06
  • Unless the file was connected to your Time Machine recovery of the file will not be possible. The same would be true on any operating system, with Windows, there is Shadow Copy/File History, which has to be enabled. – Ramhound May 20 '15 at 14:41

2 Answers2

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When data is overwritten, you write some cases iover the same file allocation place, so you are unavailable to recover that data because it changes, in other cases you data is saved in non contiguous place so you are avaliable to recover if it lost with many Data Recovery Software as PhotoRec avaliable to OSX too.

Usualy Office Software works in second way.

Reference Here

UPDATED:

Francisco Tapia
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    This isn't generally correct. When many programs (I think including Excel) save a new file over an old one, they actually delete the old file and then create a new file with the same name. The new file might be allocated the same disk blocks that the old one occupied, but it also might not. – Gordon Davisson May 20 '15 at 15:14
  • @Gordon Davisson i did some research and you are right, ive updated the answer to provide the focused one. ty. – Francisco Tapia May 20 '15 at 15:34
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The original file is definitely lost, unless Time Machine managed to make a copy. However, you may want to check the autosave folder at ~\Library\Application Support\Microsoft\Office\Office 2011 AutoRecovery for the old file. Most probably this won't help though, since Excel should have saved the new file contents there as well.

Dmitry Grigoryev
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