Excel File Erased Own Data

Hey everyone, I'm new here so I am hoping that I have come to the right place because I am at a total loss.

I help with the general IT out at a golf course I play as a favor to them and it's really more of a hobby for me but they seriously stumped me with excel problems yesterday.

The manager who works with a couple of excel files everyday suddenly couldn't open either of them after transferring them to her external hard drive to work from home. She moves the file back and forth from her external based on which is the most current if she has been working from home and has been doing so for over 2 years without a problem. The external she uses is 2 months old.

She started receiving the "the file you are trying to open is in a different format than specified by the file extension" error. Now obviously she didn't change the file name or extension or where the file was located so when she clicked "yes" that she wanted to open the file the workbook opened and there was no data in it.

I looked through the file manager and all her excel files showed a normal size of around 30-40kb but the file she is having issues with was showing 0kb.

I tried every resource online I could find yesterday in order to restore the data in the file or too see if anyone else had dealt with this problem before but I couldn't come up with a solution so that is why I am here. Has anyone ever seen an excel file suddenly erase all its data before? Is this a hard drive issue perhaps? Any help is greatly appreciated because I have tried everything I can come up with and it hasn't done a thing to fix the situation.

Thanks in advance.

The 0KB file must be corrupted and useless. Use the latest backup and re-enter the latest data.

Data can become corrupted if the external drive is disconnected before it has finished writing the file which can result in a partial file or a 0KB file. Does she use the Safely remove hardware feature of Windows? If not, she should.

She should be saving to the computer's hard drive then copying over to the external drive. That way she has at least a backup of sorts.

I got "burned" a couple of times myself just through being careless and not paying attention. I got away with it for a while then I got "caught" ....lesson learned.

Working directly off of external media is even worse for corrupting data...learned the hard way on that one too.

I agree with newdoverman...it always happens to some-one else, "I know what Im doing", so it wont happen to me...until it does!!

Perhaps instead of an external HDD, she could try using a memory stick? They are pretty cheap, come in respectable sizes and are almost indestructable - again, make sure you eject them before removing them

I was trying to help a member yesterday, and the file they uploaded for us gave exactly the same error when I tried to open it...they said they could still open it fine though.

If she was swapping between 1 and the other, then hopefully, she still has a not too out-of-date version?