I use Windows XP Pro, SP3 with Office 2003. During a routine tidy-up today, I found on my desktop a file called Backup of PASSWORDS.wbk, created 11 May 17. The file appears to be empty but its presence implies that there must originally have been a Word file called PASSWORDS.doc. I have searched everywhere I can think of, including recycle bin, which contains files going back to 1 January. But I can find no file with this name.

The question is, does Explorer have any way of locating the Word file associated with a .wbk backup file? I'd like to find it because if there is  such a Word file, I want to make sure it is either encrypted, or doesn't contain any sensitive information. The existence of the file is a mystery, since I seldom if ever give upper case filenames. Call me paranoid but I am slightly suspicious that something strange has happened.

Thanks for any suggestions.

A search for files modified on 11 May 17 might remind you of what you were doing that day.

Jumper, the first thing I did was a global search for files modified between 10 and 12/5/17. My question is: Does Explorer have any way of locating the Word file associated with a .wbk backup file?

Edited May 23, 20179 yr by skylark53

Search for _all_ file types!

On 5/23/2017 at 8:21 AM, skylark53 said:

Jumper, the first thing I did was a global search for files modified between 10 and 12/5/17. My question is: Does Explorer have any way of locating the Word file associated with a .wbk backup file?

I doubt that any software has recorded what created the file, I think that is what you are asking. You can try opening the file in a hex editor/strings viewer and see if Word had written the original file location in there somewhere.