Word Document Data Recovery Options

You've spent hours working on a report, and then your Word document just disappeared from the screen! Your computer crashed, some arcane error forced Word to close, or you've just unwittingly closed a document before clicking a save button.

The lesson to save early and often is learned the hard way, but what now?

Don't despair yet! There are some things to try before accepting the data loss. In most cases, the lost document can be fully or partially recovered.

If you're lucky, Windows may have automatically saved your file. When you start Word program the next time, see if there are any recovered documents, so called AutoRecovery files, in the Document Recovery pane.

AutoRecovery is a feature that performs an emergency backup of open documents when an error occurs. By default, AutoRecovery is set to ten minutes: that means that Word will automatically save a backup of your open document every ten minutes. You can change that interval by going to File - Options - Save. You can also select the option to keep the last saved autoversion if you close without saving.

Even when the AutoRecovery option was not selected, you could try to force Word to recover the document. Click Open, select the document, click the down arrow and then click Open and Repair. If the document was closed normally, AutoRecovery will not kick in, and no auto recovery files will be saved.

You may be able to bring back the document draft. It is a little known fact that the drafts in all applications within MS Office are saved automatically. After the crash, when opening a new Word document, go to File - Info - Manage versions. If there are previous versions of the file you've lost, you will be able to recover it by clicking the dropdown menu and selecting the option Recover Unsaved Documents. The program will open the location where you can browse recent copies of unsaved files. Word saves copies of unsaved documents for four days before the program deletes them.

To recover your document, select the draft, open it as a new document in the Word and this time save it properly. If a document is corrupted, you can try to open it with the Open and Repair option.

If neither of these recovery method worked for you, try searching for your lost document in the temporary files.

Microsoft doesn't provide a way to recover files that have been emptied from the Recycle bin. In those cases, you will have to use third-party tools to recover deleted documents.