Recover Your Unsaved Word Documents via AutoSave & AutoRecover Features – Part 1

Accidents always occur to our computer files, including our Word documents. In this part, we will mainly talk about AutoSave & AutoRecover features in Word so that we can recover unsaved documents in data disasters.

As is often the case, when you are working on your word file, word program closes abnormally before you can save changes to your file. Causes can be various: such as a sudden power outage, hardware malfunction, or an unstable computer system and so on. Unfortunately, you can’t always prevent these unexpected problems from happening. However, there are some steps you can take to protect your data and restore maximum data possible. In this article, we will look at how to automatically save and recover your Word files.

Enable and Adjust AutoSave Option

1. Click “File” menu, and choose “Options”.
2. In the subsequent dialog box, switch to “Save” page, find “Save AutoRecover information every 10 minutes check box” option (the default setting is 10 minutes in Word). You can adjust it to your desired auto-save time interval here.

Theoretically, we can change the auto-save time interval to as short as possible, so as to ensure minimum loss of data. However, the performance of your computer is a limiting factor you cannot ignore, as frequent auto-saving of files influences computer performance. Therefore, when you adjust this time interval, you should better take this factor into account.

Anyway, since nowadays the performance of our computers are usually very powerful. It is safely to set the internal to 1 minute without impacting the performance a lot, but can decrease the chances of data losses greatly.

In a word, AutoSave feature will help you recover all accidently unsaved word documents. In the next section, we will then turn to discuss a special situation, that is, manmade mis-operation.

Regret Medicine for Your Mis-operation

Let’s talk about another situation you may come across. Sometimes when you want to close your file, in the following pop-up window asking ”Do you want to save changes made to Microsoft word Document”, you accidentally choose “Don’t save”, in such cases, you may lost the work you have done permanently. However, you can change some settings in word to reduce your loss. Under the aforementioned “Save” page, click the “Keep the last autosaved version if I close without saving” checkbox. Upon doing so, you will reserve the last autosaved file if you accidentally close your file without saving.

Therefore, if you have been working for a long time but forget to save a file or if the power goes out, the file you have been working on will contain all or at least some of the data since you last saved it. But remember: the auto-save feature is not a substitute for manually saving your work by clicking “Save” button. The safest way to reserve the work you have done is to save your files regularly.

Retrieve Your Auto-Saved Files

In the next part, we will further talk about how to retrieve the auto-saved files in Word. Also, we will provide solutions if the auto-saved files are also damaged.

Author Introduction

Kelly Zhao is a data recovery expert in DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including excel recovery and pdf repair software products. For more information visit www.datanumen.com