How to recover unsaved or lost Word documents Mac Step 1: Check the Trash. In some cases, your file might be missing because you deleted it. Step 2: Recover your documents using Time Machine. Step 3: Look for the file in the Word AutoRecovery folder. Step 4: Look in the Temporary folder.
By If your power goes out or your computer malfunctions when working on an Word for Mac 2011 document, all you have to do is open the application again. Word 2011 for Mac looks for and opens any AutoRecover files for the document(s) that you were working on when an unexpected crash occurred.
Your document opens with “Recovered” appended to the filename. Choose File→Save As from the menu bar to restore the original filename and location. Word for Mac can recover files that were open because, by default, Word autosaves your document every ten minutes while you’re working on it.
If you want, you can change the save time interval within the AutoRecover setting as follows:. Choose Word→Preferences→Save from the menu bar. Word’s Save preferences are displayed. Change the number of minutes in the Save AutoRecover Info Every: X Minutes setting. The default is 10 minutes. Entering a lower number saves more often, but you may notice Word is more sluggish when it saves so often.
Entering a higher number may make Word perform better, but you may lose more changes if a power outage or computer crash occurs. You can deselect this check box if you don’t want Word to save an AutoRecover file. You might do this for extremely large documents that take a long time to save. Of course, if you experience a power outage or computer crash, you will lose all your changes since the last time you manually saved the file. You don’t need to select the Always Create Backup Copy check box. With AutoRecover and Time Machine, the bases are covered.
The option is there only for backward compatibility. Click OK when you’re finished. Rarely, Word might not automatically display the AutoRecover file for the document(s) you were working on the next time you open Word. In that case, do the following in Word to open the AutoRecover file. Choose File→Open from the menu bar. Type AutoRecover or type a keyword or phrase in the Spotlight Search box in the top-right corner of the Open dialog. Double-click the most recently saved AutoRecover file, or select the file and click Open.
If you did a keyword or phrase search, use the Last Opened information to help you choose a likely file to open. If the file you want is grayed-out, choose All Files in the Enable pop-up menu, which allows you to open any file type. You can also use Mac OS X Time Machine to recover any file that you’ve saved at least once. When you use Word for Mac, it’s nearly impossible to lose more than a few minutes’ worth of work thanks to AutoRecover and Time Machine.
You can hardly find a computer user who never experienced either a crash of MS Office apps, or an unexpected power-down of their Mac, or Mac computer crash, leading to loss of unsaved MS Office (Word, Excel) documents. Instead of redoing all the work that was lost, just grab a copy of Disk Drill and that are highly possible to still be available. Disk Drill can help even when MS Office keeps loading an incorrect version of the document you were working on.
Launch Disk Drill, find the partition/logical volume within the main system disk where MS Office is installed, click Recover to run all the recovery methods, or head on to Deep Scan right away. But we don't want to miss out on Quick Scan either. Depending on exact timing and cause of the crash, it's possible that Quick Scan may pick the temporary file as well, and potentially in a better condition than the one recovered by Deep Scan. It's important to highlight the peculiarity of the problem discussed here. As soon as your active Word, Excel file is closed, the AutoRecovery document (the one that may contain a full copy of the document at the last moment of editing before a crash), is actually deleted by MS Office.
Let's say it another way, the AutoRecovery snapshots are temporary and only exist if Word or Excel apps terminate abnormally. If Word thinks everything is 'hunky dory' when it closes, then the AutoRecovery file is immediately deleted. And this is exactly where Disk Drill gets into play!