Manuscript Whacked Out.

I am having a very minor conniption on the account that, well...exactly what the subject line says.

I own a Mac and an old-but-kickin' Dell, and between the two, the file has no trouble. At work I'm on a PC, Word 07. Same for Dell.

So, one fine day I load the book and notice: the page count is 100 more than it ought to be, the word count is suddenly about 1,000 less than what it ought to be, but I think nothing of it. I write, write, write...and decide to reread.

Lo and behold: blocks of text have been replaced by boxes, which ordinarily tell me that the encoding is off.

But hurrah! I have a backup, so I copy/paste in the segments of whacked text.

Except...even the backup has one scene in boxes.

So. How do I go about fixing the encoding, if that is indeed the case? At worst, I know that there's another backup somewhere; I am very good about making spare copies. But I shall like to fix it if I can.

Any ideas?

Much thanks. I promptly turned it off and actually was replacing the damaged sections last night. I got all but one scene; the backup I keep actually saved the damages. Crap.

The thing is, shortly after NaNoWriMo, I printed the manuscript on paper; the scene that I can't restore is actually on that printout. Now...to locate it.

At worst, I can re-type it pretty close to, I can't guarantee it'd be exact, but the later editing phase will revive it pretty nicely.