Summary: How to recover unsaved word document on Windows or Mac OS? This article tells you the easy 4 methods to help you recover a lost document.
Indeed, Word documents or Excel sheets are one of the essentials of our busy typing life. From schools to official reports, they are playing a big role in today’s digital information exchange.
But sometimes when you’re typing a very long report for your today’s sales summary, a power outage suddenly shocks you, or a Blue Screen of Death/hardware failure crashes, making your word document accidentally closed without saving after computer restarts or shutdown while you’re on progress finishing it.
But don’t worry; even a whole day of a power outage or a BSOD won’t make your documents lost permanently, Here are 4 efficient ways to recover unsaved Word Document. The following methods you can use:
Table of Contents
Recover Unsaved Word Document from AutoSave Feature
Word processing software such as Microsoft Word has a feature called “AutoSave”. This feature makes your document saved in a set of certain time (example: Microsoft Word automatically saves your document every 10 minutes by default).
If you didn’t save your document Microsoft Word 2003, 2006, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018 before any power outage or a critical error comes, use this feature to check the last auto recovery word document. Sometimes there are 2 or more versions of the AutoSave word document, which you can review at the same time. To check them, double-click the document available for recovery to review it. It will open another window.
Another Way to Recover Unsaved Word Document with AutoSave Feature
If the document didn’t prompt the AutoSave Pane for you, you can still browse its default AutoSave folder by going to “File>Info>Manage Versions” and select “Recover unsaved documents” An open window will appear to select your possible unsaved word documents.
But take note, if you ignore the AutoSave prompt on your document, next time you open your document, it will not be available anymore for recovery, so do read carefully on what you’re clicking!
Recover Unsaved Word Document by searching for Word Backup Files(.asd)
Cannot find or recover unsaved Word document via the AutoSave feature? There is another trick in finding your lost Word Documents by following this procedure. (This works on Microsoft Office 2007, 2010 and 2013)
- Locate .asd file in this path: C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word
- Finding .asd file and then copy to C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles
- Launch Microsoft Word and choose File > Info > Manage Version > Recover Unsaved Documents
- Double-click the .asd file to open it.
How to Set the Default Autosave Period on Microsoft Word 2010?
Thinking the default AutoSave period 10 minutes is too short for keeping your document saved automatically, you can change the period:
Go to File > Option > Save > Save Autorecover information every 10 minutes to another number as you need.
How to Recover a Deleted Word Document on Windows 10
If the AutoSave feature and search for the .asd file don’t work, there are recovery programs can help you retrieve your lost document files such as Bitwar Data Recovery Software. It can help you recover your lost Word Documents after accidental deletion or forcing to exit without saving.
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Important Note:
Before you start recovering your documents, make sure you didn’t overwrite or put any new data to your storage device. If you copied, moved or created any new file to your storage device or target folder/directory you want to recover makes the files corrupted as you recover them, so be careful!
Steps to Recover Unsaved Word Documents with Data Recovery Software
Select the partition or drive you have the lost document
Launch Bitwar Data Recovery Software. Select the storage device where your document was last saved such as your main hard drive, external hard drive or flash disk drive. Click Next to proceed to the next step.
Choose a Recovery Mode
Accidentally deleted your document, or being deleted by another program? You can select the Quick Scan first to run the fastest scan to search for your lost documents, and turn to Deep Scan later if the Quick Scan doesn’t work. Click Next to proceed to the next step.
Select Document File Type to Shorten Scan Time
At the “Select the File Type” Selection, just check the “Document” to recover all possible document files such as Text Files, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF Files. Click Scan to start scanning your storage device for possible documents available for recovery.
Preview the Document File and Recover
Please wait as the program scans your storage device for all possible document files. Then preview the document after scanning. Hit the Recover button and select the path to save the documents.
Recover Lost Documents with Original Folder Structure
Select the documents you want to recover, and click Recover. You will see a popup windows asking you to select “Recover while maintaining the original directory structure” and “Restore to the same directory”, Simply choose recover documents with original folder structures and Click OK.
Tips: Don’t Save the files back to your drive or partition where contains your lost documents.
Conclusion
If you managed to recover unsaved word document by using above-explained methods, then that’s it! And what if you lost the word documents accidentally and you couldn’t access the world autorecover backup file .asd, then you’ll probably need the third-party data recovery software – Bitwar Data Recovery to help you recover.
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