That sucks, typewriter.
What sort of file was it? A word document? Can you search through the temp folder (assuming you're using windows) and see if there is a cached copy?

You can narrow your search to files accessed/modified just on those few days.

I think I deleted it weeks and weeks ago. I had saved it under an older filename. Before I had deleted it, I had a fleeting thought, oh, I should check to make sure I didn't do something stupid and save it there instead of the current file. But I didn't listen to myself. Poof.

I got really paranoid in the last few months of my dissertation and set up Mozy (which automatically backs up any file created/modified each day), Amazon (using Jungle disk), and a local university backup (using sync back, which is free).

It saved my ass on a few occasions.

Thanks. Backups don't help me when I sabotage myself by deleting it myself! Ah, well. It is not horrible, just annoying. I am usually very careful, but I was completely swamped that week. Serves me right.

That's okay. Today, I found out that I've misplaced a pretty important document that I should have kept and filed back in November. I really don't have an excuse because it's not like the other assistant who was here at the time was even handling the correspondence with that particular entity.

At first I thought you said:

"I am dumb. And now I am pissed. I did something stupid in February, and didn't save a life properly."

So... I guess things could be worse. :S

I had saved it under an older filename.

This is a design decision for Word that I have always, always found questionable. As a tech support person I can't tell you how many times this happened. (In later versions at least you had some document revision history stored by default -- ironically another questionable feature.)

It's too damn easy to write over the version you need with the version you just wrote.

(WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS did it just right. If you were to ask me.)