The reasons for unsaved Word documents can be various: the system crashed, the power suddenly turned off, I forgot to save the document when exiting the program, and others. They are all unpleasant and even painful. Don't be upset as you can return lost files.
None of us would like to experience the loss of unsaved, important files. Therefore, it is important to save your changes frequently to avoid such situations.
However, man will not always focus on recording his own work, but rather on expanding it. In this post, I will show you how to recover Word documents that we didn't save.
You’re lucky if you do have back of the lost/unsaved Word document. But, in most cases, users don’t have the latest backup for the Word document.
So they are wondering can I retrieve a Word document that wasn't saved.
How to recover unsaved Word document at this time? In brief, you have two choices:
Use MiniTool Power Data Recovery to recover lost Word document.
Recover previous version of Word document through Microsoft Word.
Recover Unsaved Word Document with MiniTool Power Data Recovery
In fact, unexpected file loss is a common problem that lots of people are facing with or have ever met.
Most of them struggle to know how do I recover an unsaved Word document on my computer, instead of recreating a new document with almost the same content.
In this part, you’ll learn how to recover an unsaved Word document with MiniTool Power Data Recovery in different platforms. Please read the following tips carefully if you are interested in:
How to recover unsaved Word document 2007/2013/2016
How to recover unsaved Word document Windows 10/Windows 8/Windows 7/Mac
How Do I Recover an Unsaved Word Document in 2018
How do I recover an unsaved Word document in Windows 10 or other Windows systems? There are mainly three steps to complete.
Step 1: get & install MiniTool Power Data Recovery to your computer. Then, launch it to see the main interface.
Now, you are supposed to choose one from the four function options displayed in the left-hand panel.
Tips on choosing a suitable one for your case:
If the deleted/lost Word document was saved on a local partition, please select This PC.
If your document is included in a USB flash drive/SD card, please connect the device to your computer and choose Removable Disk Drive. (How to fix when USB flash drive not recognized or external hard drive not showing up)
If you want to recover corrupt Word files from an inaccessible hard disk, you should select Hard Disk Drive.
Step 2: select the target partition/disk to scan and click on the Scan button in the lower right corner.
If you want to search for only Word files, please do the following things:
Click on the Settings button on the left side of the Scan button.
Check only Office WORD Document (*.doc) and Office2007 Word Document (*.docx) under Extra search for known file types.
Click on the OK button to confirm changes.
Click on the Scan button to start detecting Word documents.
Step 3: check all the Word documents you want to recover from the scan result. Then, you should click on the Save button to choose a storage path for them.
At last, click on the OK button to confirm and wait for the recovery to complete.
Please note:
You’ll see the following prompt window after clicking Save in a Trial edition, which will prevent you from recovering any files from the scanned drive. Basically, the Trial edition is designed to help users scan and preview files.
To recover the files found by MiniTool Power Data Recovery, you need to upgrade to a full version.
That’s how to recover the documents you have deleted or the corrupt files on Windows platform. If you have deleted a Word document from USB and want to recover it, please connect the USB device to your computer before running the Power Data Recovery software.
How to Recover Unsaved Word Document Mac
To recover lost Word document on your Mac, you should use MiniTool Mac Data Recovery.
The recovery steps are:
Get & install MiniTool Mac Data Recovery for Mac Word files recovery.
Launch it to see the main interface, in which you should choose one from the four functions available (Undelete Recovery, Damaged Partition Recovery, Lost Partition Recovery, and Digital Media Recovery). Please select the one that suits your data loss case the best!
Select the partition/disk that contains the unsaved Word document and click on the Scan/Full Scanbutton to search for Word documents. Also, you can click Settings to search for only Word files.
Wait for the scan and check all the Word documents you want to recover from Mac. Click on the Savebutton to set a safe location for storing recovered Word documents.
Please note:
The free version of MiniTool Mac Data Recovery allows you to recover no more than 1MB of data. To break this limit, you should visit this page.
Recover Unsaved Word Document with AutoSave Feature
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How to Recover a Word Document That Was Saved Over
You should recover previous version of Word document when you need a Word document that was saved over. The recovery steps are:
Keep the certain Word document opening.
Click on the File button located in the upper left corner of the pane.
The file window will appear and the Info option will be chosen by default.
Three sections are provided under Info: Permissions, Prepare for Sharing and Versions. All the versions saved automatically will be shown to you here according to the saving time.
Look at the save time of them and figure out which is the version you want.
Click on a version and Microsoft Word will open a new Word window for you.
In the new window, two options are available: Compare and Restore.
Click on the Restore button to overwrite the last saved version with the version you choose.
How Do You Recover a File You Didn't Save
The situation seems to get worse if you have made many changes to a document, then you close it without saving any changes. When you open the Word document again, you won’t be able to see any automatically saved versions in the Info window after clicking the File menu.
How can you recover the unsaved document under such circumstances?
Well, you can rely on the Recover Unsaved Documents feature or open the AutoRecover file location to check.
How to open asd file?
You can also open the AutoRecover file location and check whether your need documents are contained here. Generally, the AutoSaved Word document files will be stored in the computer with a name formed by the original file name, Unsaved tag and some special symbols & numbers (please see the picture below).
The AutoRecover files are saved as asd files and they are read-only.
Where are AutoRecover files saved?
You can find the location of AutoRecover files by the following steps:
Click on the File option in the menu bar.
Choose Options from the left-hand pane of the window.
Select Save in the Word Options window you see.
Navigate to the Save documents section on the right-hand pane.
Find the AutoRecover file location and look at the storage path after it. The default path is: C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word\ and you can change it according to needs.
When you finally find your needed document in that location, please double click to open the asd file in Microsoft Office Word. Also, two choices are available: Compare and Restore.
If it is the one you need, please select Restore to recover the unsaved Word document.
Now, you know exactly where Word saves AutoRecover files.
How do I turn on AutoRecover in Word?
Actually, the AutoRecover feature will be enabled by default. The Save AutoRecover information every _ minutes and Keep the last autosaved version if I close without saving options under Save documents section are both checked by default.
You can uncheck these two options as you need.
Can I change the time interval of AutoRecover?
In fact, the time interval is set to 10 minutes by default and you can change it to an integer ranging from 1 to 120.
The timer will be initialized every time when the new modification has been made to the Word document after the completion of the last auto-save/manual saving. And when the specified time interval is reached, a new version of the current Word document will be generated.
If you would like to save current changes manually by pressing the Save button, the timer will be cleared and stop working until new changes have been made to the document.
How Can You Recover an Unsaved Word Document after Crash
Sometimes, you may suffer from a sudden Microsoft Office Word app crash or a system crash while you’re working on a Word document. What’s the right thing to do at this time? Definitely, you should do the following things to recover unsaved Word document after the crash:
Restart the Microsoft Office Word or the restart the computer.
Go to the original place to find and open the correct Word document.
Take a look at the Document Recovery section located in the left-hand pane of Word.
There may be many files that Word has recovered for you and they are available in the list; you should make sure which one you need.
Right click on the file and choose Save As.
Choose a location for it and click on the Save button.
Please note:
If you see many files in the list and you don’t know which one to save, you may look at the date and creation time under the name of each file (that may give a clue).
If you see multiple versions of the same file, it’s better for you to choose the one with the most recent time since it often contains the most recent changes.
To see the detailed content and changes, you can click on a file to open the document directly. You can continue working with the file you choose or save it first.
Please close the Document Recovery pane when you are sure you have recovered all the documents you need.
All in all, if you find your Word document with very important information stored in is missing, you should react immediately by following the suggestions gave in the previous content to recover Unsaved Word document all by yourself.
Final Words
When you work with documents, Word will create data to be automatically saved on your computer. You will return them in the event of a removable media failure or other failure.
If, while working with a file, it was not saved manually or the autosave option was turned off and the program was closed, the file will be recovered only to the state of the last save. Now you may have learned about how to recover lost word document.
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