Recovering Deleted or Unsaved Word Files
Looking for a tool to recover Microsoft Word files? Deleted important documents or removed Word files from the Recycle Bin? Documents blocked by a virus or deleted by an anti-virus tool? Disk cleanup caused severe data loss? Hetman Word Recovery will help you get your documents back!
Recover Your Data
Hetman Word Recovery 2.6
Hetman Word Recovery recovers lost and deleted documents in Microsoft Word and Open Office formats, Adobe PDF files and many types of plain text files. Supporting all types of storage media, Hetman Word Recovery can extract documents from FAT and NTFS volumes.
Using Hetman Word Recovery could not be made easier. The convenient step by step wizard guides you through the recovery process one little step after another. The built-in viewer and automated pre- recovery check deliver a 100% success guarantee. If a document appears in the list of recoverable files, it’ll be recovered with no “ifs” and “buts”.
Video Tutorial
Not feeling like downloading stuff? You don’t have to! Watch this two-minute video to see how powerful and easy to use Hetman Word Recovery is.
Why Documents Can Go Missing
Hetman Word Recovery can help in a number of situations. Deleted documents, cleared Recycle Bin, accidental formatting or repartitioning the disk, corrupted storage media and power failures can cause a loss of data. The tool can handle these situations, getting your documents back in no time.

Hardware Upgrades
Hardware upgrades are among the most common reasons of data loss. When replacing the hard drive or upgrading computer hardware, most users will only copy information kept in the My Documents folder, cleaning up or ditching old hardware soon afterwards. More often than not, documents stored elsewhere are not copied. Saved a working document on the desktop? Need a recent copy from the Recycle Bin? Hetman Word Recovery can help you get those files from the old hard drive even if it’s been reformatted or repartitioned.

Formatting and Repartitioning
Formatting or repartitioning the disk may cause the loss of entire sets of documents. System tool misconfiguration or their accidental use may render the entire disk inaccessible by corrupting just a few bits of data in the beginning of the disk. Bad sectors are common for older hardware while premature wear plagues modern hard drives. Copying files over the network presents its own share of problems. Lost Word documents in one of those situations? Hetman Word Recovery can help!

Backup Errors and Redundant Storage Failures
Many computer users rely on redundant storage (NAS or RAID arrays) as their only means of data protection. However, NAS storage systems and RAID arrays may fail just as often, if not more frequent, as single hard drives. Inconsistently planned or improperly implemented backup strategies present a great deal of trouble when it comes to actually restoring the data from a backup. In other words, in great many situations it’s plain faster and easier to simply recover the documents from your own hard drive rather than relying on the backup, remote or redundant storage system.

Malware Activities
A major number of malware aims at Word documents, locking, infecting or destroying the files. When removing the virus, antivirus software may cause even more damage than the virus itself, corrupting or deleting assumingly infected documents. Hetman Word Recovery can successfully unlock documents blocked by the virus, undelete files removed by the antivirus, and recover Word documents deleted or destroyed in the course of infection.

Accidental Editing and Corruption
How many times did you wish you had an older copy of a recently edited document you just saved? Accidental or malicious edits and sudden power failures while saving the document may leave you with a useless copy. Hetman Word Recovery offers you a way to recover previously saved versions of the document. Never saved the document but want the content back? Microsoft Word makes temporary saves of all documents being edited. Hetman Word Recovery recognizes and recovers these temporary files, effectively enabling access to unsaved content.
- Backup Policies and Fault Tolerant Systems
Why can we lose data even with fail-safe systems? The mistakes that users make most often. Data on a hard drive or a memory card can be easily lost, but their recovery is very difficult. There are definitely more than seven common mistakes made by co…
- When Software Can Help: SSD and HDD
Read about must-have conditions to make recovering lost data possible – and most effective. When experiencing a data loss situation, it is essential to be able to tell whether or not you can fix it yourself. Modern storage media is reliable eno…
- Top Ways to Lose Your Data: Human Factor
In this article, we’ll focus on the most widespread causes of losing data due to lack of user’s attention or knowledge. This article continues the list of the most common data storage mistakes made by our customers. We keep receiving queries from our…
- Data Recovery is Impossible: SSD, Cloud and Online Services
The difficulties in recovering files deleted from SSDs, cloud and online storage services, RAID systems and NAS devices. In the first part of the article, we took a look at programs for recovering data from traditional hard drives. In this second par…
- When Software Can’t Help: Hard Disk Drives
When data recovery software can’t help you anymore: the signs of your hard disk worn out to the limit. As manufacturers of software tools for recovering users’ data, we are often presented with cases when our tools could not help. Is there a differen…
Features and Benefits
Hetman Software tool is your last line of defense when protecting your documents. The tool will recover Word documents in case of any accident causing the loss of data, undelete files and recover information from damaged or misconfigured media.
Recovers Document Files
Hetman Word Recovery is designed to recover documents saved by Microsoft Office 97, 2000, XP, 2003, 2007, 2010, and 2013, as well as OpenOffice. The following types of files are supported:
- DOC – Microsoft Word 97-2003 Document (*.doc);
- DOCX – Microsoft Word Document (*.docx);
- DOT – Document Template (*.dot);
In addition to Microsoft Word, Hetman Word Recovery recovers documents saved in native OpenDocumet Format. This document format is employed by Open, Libre and Star Office (Writer). The following file types are supported:
- ODT – OpenDocument Text Document (*.odt);
Finally, Hetman Word Recovery supports the following file formats:
- PDF – Adobe Portable Document Format (*.pdf);
- PDB – Document File (*.pdb);
- RTF – Rich Text Format File (*.rtf);
- WPD – WordPerfect Document (*.wpd);
- WRI – Windows Write Document (*.wri);
- Recovering Office Document Files
Read about recovering a deleted document without leaving your home, and what utilities are good enough for an ordinary user. Documents such as Word files, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, Access databases and a wide range of other titles…
- Shooting RAW (digital negatives): Better Image Quality
In this article we’ll talk about advantages and disadvantages of RAW image formats when compared to JPEG. In film era, there were slides and prints. In today’s digital world, there are RAW’s (digital negatives) and JPEGs (digital pictures). Photograp…
- Recovering Deleted Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentation
Read about the causes of losing office documents, electronic tables and presentations, and how to recover the most valuable stuff you used to have. Office documents are among the most important files for any computer user. Accidentally deleting or ot…

Supported Storage Media
Hetman Word Recovery supports all storage devices formatted with FAT (VFAT / FAT16 / FAT32 / exFAT) and NTFS. The tool supports compressed and encrypted volumes. NTFS Alternate Data Streams can be recovered. Hetman Word Recovery supports desktop and laptop hard drives and SSD drives regardless of make and model, USB drives and external devices including secure flash drives. All types of memory cards are supported. Hetman Word Recovery can recover documents from RAID arrays, assuming that the RAID is assembled and fully functional.
- Disk Fragmentation and Data Recovery Issues
What data fragmentation is and how it affects the quality of data recovery. Disk fragmentation is a fact of our daily life. It’s a well-known fact that fragmentation affects performance, specifically the speed of disk access operations. However, disk…
- Recovering Data from External Storage
Read about recovering data from network storage (NAS) and external USB or eSata disks formated in FAT or NTFS. Various types of external storage quickly gain popularity. External storage systems are easier to maintain, upgrade and extend than compute…
- Physical Failures of NAS Storage Systems
Read about recovering data from a faulty network storage: the things you should and shouldn’t do. Can data recovery software help you? Information above applies to logical errors in external storage systems in a fully working state. But what if some …
- Android and Windows Phone: Data Loss and Recovery Issues
Read this article to know why data can be lost from mobile devices and how it can be recovered. A guide on data recovery from a memory card. Android tablets and smartphones seem to dominate the mobile market, or at least its price-conscious side. Win…
- How Students Can Protect Against Data Loss with a Laptop
Read this article for advice on reducing the risk of data loss – and make things easier even when this disaster strikes you. Laptop computers are great for managing student workload. Often being the one and only computer a student has, laptops …
The Recovery Engine
Hetman Word Recovery employs a range of highly sophisticated algorithms to locate deleted files. While the file system (if still available) is an important source of information, Hetman Word Recovery does not rely solely on the file system as it may be corrupted or emptied (e.g. if the disk is formatted or repartitioned). In addition to file system data, Hetman Word Recovery employs comprehensive signature search, reading the entire content of the device in an attempt to locate supported file types. For example, DOC and DOCX files have “D0 CF” and “50 4B” signatures in the headers. When a signature is located, Hetman Word Recovery further analyzes the header in order to determine the length of the file. In a final step immediately preceding to adding the file to the recovery list, Hetman Word Recovery validates the file by performing an automated integrity check. This check ensures that every entry appearing on the list of recoverable files is a valid document that can be viewed, opened and edited with no problems.
- Inside FAT: File Search
Read about peculiarities of data recovery from a FAT-formatted device. In 2013, there are plenty of file systems around. There are FAT, NTFS, HFS and many other file systems used by the many different operating systems. And yet, the oldest and simple…
- Data Recovery of Fragmented Files
Read this article to find out how to prevent file fragmentation, and how signature search works when recovering a fragmented disk. Recovering files from fragmented disks can be more difficult than restoring files that are stored on the disk in a sing…
- Recovering Information with Signature Search
Read this article to find out how signature search works in data recovery tools allowing you to save information even from formatted, damaged and inaccessible disks. Signature search is a major data recovery technology that revolutionized the entire …
- Why Deleted Files Can Be Recovered?
Get to know how files are stored on your hard disk and how Windows works when you delete files. With so many inexpensively priced data recovery and undelete tools on the market, one may wonder what magic they do to get deleted files back. Is it reall…

Ease of Use
Hetman Word Recovery is one of the fastest recovery tools on the market, and one of the easiest to use. The tool allows recovering documents in just a few easy steps. Unlike competition, Hetman Word Recovery features a built-in integrity check, relieving the user from going through a huge number of invalid entries. With Hetman Word Recovery, you won’t need to go through hundreds of files to locate a single “working” one!
Step by Step Wizard
Using Hetman Word Recovery is just as easy as installing the tool. In fact, the process looks very similar. You get the same familiar wizard guiding you through the recovery process one step after another. You’ll just need to select the disk or device that contains your documents, specify Quick or Comprehensive recovery mode, and click “Next” to begin the analysis. Hetman Word Recovery locates all recoverable documents in a matter of minutes (might take a bit longer with Comprehensive mode engaged), displaying them in a clickable list. You’ll be able to save recoverable files onto a hard drive, burn them to a CD or DVD, create an ISO image or upload directly to an FTP server.
Pre-Recovery Preview
Hetman Word Recovery lists recoverable documents in a clickable gallery, displaying thumbnail previews of each document. Clicking on any thumbnail will instantly display a small preview. Double-click the thumbnail to open a full-size viewer. Please note that Hetman Word Recovery speeds up preview operations by excluding text formatting and objects from the preview. Rest assured that the final recovered versions of your documents will be saved complete with all fonts, formatting, pictures and objects intact!
Searching and Filtering
Looking for a particular file or a set to recover? You don’t have to go through all records to locate that single file! Hetman Word Recovery implements powerful searching and filtering tools, allowing you to have only the files that meet your search criteria to appear in the recovery list. If you only need to recover a certain file or a certain set of files, there are two options available. First, you may specify your search criteria just before Hetman Word Recovery begins scanning the disk. This may speed up the scanning, but if you’ll need to recover some other documents, you’ll have to scan the disk once again. Alternatively, you can filter out the results after performing the full scan. You can search and filter documents by their names or part of the name, extension, create/modify date or file size.
- Forensic Disk Analysis
Read about the difference between commercial anmd forensic approaches to data recovery. Information recovery methods in forensics; algorithms, requirements and software for collecting evidence. Digital forensics and data recovery walk hand to hand. D…
- S.M.A.R.T. Parameters and Early Signs of a Failing Hard Disk
This article talks about tools to use and parameters to check for to prevent accidental data loss due to hard drive failure. S.M.A.R.T. (or simply SMART) is a monitoring system built into most modern hard drives. S.M.A.R.T. stands for Self-Monitoring…
- Secure Data Destruction
Today we are covering an unusual topic that’s quite the opposite of what we’re usually writing about. In this article, we’ll discuss methods and issues of full, complete, secure and irreversible data destruction. Delete in a way that would make recov…
- Recovering Data: a Toolkit for Administrator
Read about recovering data from damaged disks, saving files with FTP or burning them to CDs: a system administrator’s data recovery kit. Data recovery tools for home users and small businesses are utterly different from tools intended for the use by …
- Why Data Recovery Comes Handy Even if You Do RAID and Backups
This article will explain the meaning of the term “fault tolerance”, the extra security RAID systems add, and what backups can and can’t do when it comes to securing valuable information. Familiarizing oneself with one of the many data recovery tools…
Built-In Safety Features
The last thing you want from a data recovery tool is corrupting or overwriting the very files you’re about to recover. But don’t you worry! Hetman Word Recovery implements all the required features to make the recovery process as safe as theoretically possible. Make sure you download and install Hetman Word Recovery to a disk other than that containing the documents to recover, and start the recovery as soon as possible to increase your chance of success.
Read Only Mode and Virtual Drive Images
Hetman Word Recovery strictly enforces the read-only access mode to ensure that no data is altered on the disk during the scan. However, that’s not enough when you have a physically unstable or badly worn device with multiple bad sectors. If this is the case, make sure to use the extra-safe mode. In this mode, Hetman Word Recovery creates a virtual disk image by reading the disk in a single long read operation. This minimizes the risk of the damage and reduces the number of head movements, thus reducing the chance of premature failure. After capturing the disk image, Hetman Word Recovery will no longer require the original disk or storage media, and can continue the recovery by using that disk image.

Saving the Files
You’ll need a different hard drive, flash drive, or at least a different drive letter to save the documents you’re recovering. This may require a lot of free space depending on the number of documents you are recovering. If you don’t have that much free space on your other disk, you can set Hetman Word Recovery to save your files to a different media. Hetman Word Recovery can automatically burn files onto a CD or DVD media, create burnable ISO images, or upload the files onto an FTP server while they are being recovered.
System Requirements
Hetman Word Recovery has minimal system requirements, and can be used even on legacy systems. There are no specific requirements to CPU or available memory. The recovery speed will mostly depend on the speed of your hard drive. Hetman Word Recovery was thoroughly tested in all 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows starting with Windows XP and up to the latest Windows 10. Hetman Word Recovery was tested and officially supports the following operating systems:
Windows XP:
- Home Edition
- Professional Edition
Windows Vista
- Starter
- Home Basic и Premium
- Business
- Enterprise
- Ultimate
Windows 8 / 8.1 / Ten
- Core
- Pro
- Enterprise
- RT
Windows Server
- 2003
- Home Server
- 2008
- Small Business Server
- 2008 R2
- Home Server 2011
- 2012
- 2012 R2
Windows 7
- Starter
- Home Basic и Premium
- Professional
- Enterprise
- Ultimate
Average user rating: 4.4 (418 votes).
- Recovering Protected and Encrypted NTFS Files
This article describes the process of recovery for files protected, encrypted or compressed with EFS (NTFS), and gives you hints on how to tackle possible problems. NTFS has a lot of features not even imaginable in the older file system, FAT. Alterna…
- Recovering Compressed NTFS Files
Below, we’ll have a closer look on opportunities to recover files compressed with NTFS tools. To learn more about recovering protected and encrypted files, please read our article called Recovering Protected and Encrypted NTFS Files. Later on, we wil…
- Choosing the Right File System: FAT and NTFS
Read to find out what file system is better and when, and learn what devices are compatble with FAT or NTFS. Windows offers the choice between two file system families: FAT and NTFS. When formatting new media, you can have a question as to which one …
- Practical Hints on Choosing Between FAT and NTFS
Read this article to know how to choose a file system properly when formatting a storage device, and which file system is better for a hard disk, USB drive or memory card. Enough theory! To learn more about the differences between file systems, read …

Expert Reviews
Reputed computer publications and data recovery laboratories recommend using our software. See the independent experts’ opinion.
Recommended Products
If you want a more advanced tool, try Hetman Partition Recovery or Hetman FAT Recovery instead. Hetman Partition Recovery supports both the FAT and NTFS file systems, while Hetman FAT Recovery is designed to recover files from FAT-formatted devices only (e.g. memory cards, flash drives, USB stick etc.) at a lower price.
Hetman Partition Recovery
Comprehensive undelete, unformat partition and hard drive recovery tool! Recovers information from all types of storage media formatted with FAT and NTFS. Use this tool for recovering information following accidents of any type.
Hetman FAT Recovery
Supporting all types of healthy and damaged storage media, Hetman FAT Recovery can recover data from hard disks, SSD drives, USB flash drives and a wide range of memory cards. Use this tool for recovering information after all types of accidents.