Recover Unsaved Documents in Microsoft Office

No one is safe from a power outage or computer crash, so you need to take every precaution to save your data when working on important documents.

This can be helped by enabling and configuring yourAutoSave and AutoRecover options in Microsoft Office. In doing so, you’ll help to prevent data loss, and facilitate the recovery of your unsaved files.

Enable AutoSave and Auto Recover in MS Office

1. Open the desired Office program (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Visio, Project…) and click on the File > Options > Save > Save documents.

2. Make sure that the Save AutoRecover information every [_] minutes checkbox is ticked and then choose how often you’d like MS Office to automatically save your documents (select a value between 1 and 120).

How To Enable File AutoRecovery in MS Office

1. The "Keep the last autosaved version if close without saving" option enables you to recover unsaved documents (with minimal loss of data).

2. Once you’ve enabled this feature, MS Office will save copies of the last autosaved versions of your documents in the UnsavedFiles folder located in C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office

3. To recover unsaved files, you simply have to open a new or existing document and then click on File > Info > Manage Versions > Recover Unsaved Documents.

Files are kept for a period of 4 days.