“I saved an important Word document on my desktop, renamed it, and then made it hidden. Some days later, I selected ‘view hidden files,’ but my file’s not there! What should I do?”

What a strange and dangerous way to hide a file!

Because it was hidden, there’s no good way to track what happened. But you might — might — be able to recover the file.

I assume you searched the entire disk for the file, including the Recycle Bin.

You might also try searching for both the file’s original name, and whatever you renamed it to; as well as close variants, in case you mistyped.

You also could use File Manager’s search function to show you all files created on or around whatever date it was when you originally created your hidden file.

You could try an undelete tool to see what deleted files are in the Desktop folder; or across your entire disk.

It’s possible the missing files are in any local or cloud backups or in File Histories/Restore Previous Version entries made between now and when you first created the file; but without knowing more about your setup and its backups, I can’t really say.

If you can’t find it with searches like those I just mentioned, then you’re probably not going to get the file back easily.

Your best remaining option might be a long, labor-intensive search using a sector editor or similar tool.

But it won’t be fun, and I’d say the odds of success are low.

Perhaps the file is now gone due to simple human or software error; or deliberate malice (maybe someone who knows that you store personal files as “hidden” on the desktop is messing with you?); or some routine cleanup operation ran amok; who knows? Making the file hidden makes it almost impossible to figure out what happened, and complicates recovery.

There’s a better way: In the future, use Word’s built-in encryption function (highly secure 256-bit AES) to scramble and password-protect the document’s contents. Next, save the sensitive file with an innocuous, boring, non-attention-getting name. Even if someone snoops your PC, they might pass over a boring-sounding file; and if they don’t, the encryption will stop them cold.

For even more security, don’t place the file on your desktop where anyone can see it; bury it at the bottom of a series of nested folders with innocuous names. That way, snoops will have a hard time even finding the file; and still won’t be able to access it (due to the encryption) if they do.

And because you won’t be tinkering with the file attributes, all normal permissions, system tools (including backups), and user operations should handle the file normally — same as any other non-hidden files. That, in turn, reduces the chances of you ever losing a sensitive file this way again!

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