DataNumen Word Repair

How to recover unsaved Word documents?

To recover unsaved Word documents, you can try many methods. And for most of them, we need to use the AutoRecover option in Word.

1. AutoRecover option

Microsoft Word has an AutoRecover option. By default, it will auto-save your Word documents every 10 minutes. To change this option, please do as follows:

1. Start MS Word.
2. Click the File tab, then click Options.
3. In the Word Options dialog box, click the Save tab.
4. Ensure the Save AutoRecover information every 10 minutes option is selected. And you can change the save interval as needed.
5. Also, ensure the Keep the last AutoRecovered version if I close without saving is also selected. Note: If you decrease the save interval, for example, to 1 minute, then Word will auto-save your document more frequently, which will degrade the performance, and consume more spaces on your hard disk, especially when your Word document is large. But if you increase the save interval, for example, to 100 minutes. Then if Word crashes in the 199th minutes, then your changes made from 100th to 199th minutes will be lost. So a save interval of 10 minutes is a good trade-off between the performance and the data losses.

2. Recover via the Document Recovery panel

Word will check for the AutoRecover information each time when you start it. So, if it crashes before you save your document, you can simply do as follows to recover the unsaved Word document:

1. Start Microsoft Word.
2. If Word finds and saved AutoRecover information on the hard disk, it will show a Document Recovery panel. All documents that can be recovered are listed as “document name [Original]” or “document name [Recovered]”.
3. If your lost file is in the list, double-click to open it.
4. Click Save As to save the document to a new file.

3. Recover via the Documents tab

If the Document Recovery panel does not appear, you can try to do as follows:

1. Click the File tab, then click Open.
2. Click the Recent tab.
3. In the right panel, select the Documents tab.
4. Click the Recover Unsaved Documents button at the bottom.
5. In the Open file dialog, double-click the wanted document to open it.
6. In the top bar, select Restore to restore the unsaved document.
7. Click Save As to save the document to a new file.

4. Recover via the Manage Document function

Or, you can use Manage Document to recover the unsaved Word documents, as follows:

1. Start Microsoft Word.
2. Go to Home > New, then click Blank Document.
3. The menu items will appear.
4. Select File > Info
5. In the right panel, click the Manage Document button.
6. You will see two options, Recover Unsaved Documents and Delete Unsaved Documents.
7. Click Recover Unsaved Documents to browse and recover the unsaved documents.

5. Find AutoRecover files directly

You may also try to find the AutoRecover file directly. The AutoRecover file has a file type of .asd.

On the Windows system, it is under the following directories:

• C:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word
• C:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles

where you should replace <UserName> with your user name.

On the Mac OS system, then:

For Word 2016/2019/Office 365 in 2020/2021, the directory is:

/Users/<UserName>/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery

For Word 2011, the directory is:

/Users/<UserName>/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/Office 2011 AutoRecovery

6. Find and recover from temporary files

You can also find temporary files on your local computer which may be your unsaved document, as follows:

1. Set the file type to .tmp, and other search criteria based on what you know about your lost file, such as the size, last update date & time, etc.
2. After you find the temporary files, copy it to your own directory.
3. Rename the .tmp files to .doc or .docx files, based on the type of your original document.
4. Open the renamed files via MS Word.
5. You may also use our Word document recovery tool to repair the temporary files found in step 2.

For Windows 10, version 2004 or later, there is a Windows File Recovery tool. You can use it to recover deleted or lost files.

If all the above methods fail, then you can use a professional Word recovery tool to recover files.

How to recover a deleted Word document?

If you store the MS Word document on the local computer, you can recover it via the following 3 methods:

1. If you have backed up your computer beforehand, then you can restore the deleted Word document from the backup.
2. You can also check the Recycle Bin. If you have not emptied it after the deletion, then you can restore the deleted Word document from Recycle Bin. If you don’t know the file name, then you can search for files with file types such as .doc and .docx.
3. You may also use a data recovery software to scan your hard drive and recover deleted files.

If you store the Word document on a document library or list in Microsoft Teams or SharePoint, you can also restore the deleted Word document from the SharePoint site recycle bin.

If you store the Word document on OneDrive, then you can also restore the deleted Word document from OneDrive recycle bin.

How to recover a lost word document?

A lost Word document is just like a deleted document, so you can try similar methods to recover it from your backup, Recycle bin, or via a data recovery software.

How to recover an overwritten Word document?

It is a bit hard but still possible to recover overwritten Word documents. Below are some methods:

1. Restore the overwritten Word document with a previous backup, if any.
2. Use a data recovery utility to scan your hard drives. Sometimes, it can also recover overwritten files.

Can you recover corrupt Word documents on Mac OS?

Yes, you can do as follows to repair your Microsoft Word document on Mac:

1. Install our Word data recovery software on a PC/Windows computer.
2. Copy the corrupt Word document from Mac to PC.
3. Repair the corrupt Word document on PC with DataNumen Word Repair.
4. Copy the fixed Word document back to Mac.

Sorry but DataNumen Word Repair does not support to run under Mac directly.

How can a Word document get corrupted?

Many reasons that will corrupt a Word document, such as virus, malware, an unexpected crash of Word, hard drive formatting, etc. We recommend you to have a professional Word data recovery tool on hand so you can repair your corrupt document as soon as possible.

Which versions of Word are supported?

Currently, our tool supports repairing documents created by Microsoft Word 6.0, 95, 97, 2000, XP, 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word for Microsoft Office 365. Moreover, it supports both doc and docx file formats.

Which versions of Windows are supported?

Currently, our tool supports Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10 and Windows Server 2003/2008/2012/2016/2019 operating systems. And it supports both 32bit and 64bit systems.

Do I need to have MS WORD on my computer to run your Word file recovery tool?

Yes, you need to have MS Word installed on your computer to run our file recovery software. Before repairing a damaged Microsoft Word document, if our file recovery software detects that there is no Word installed, it will pop up an error message and abort the data recovery process.

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