How to return the old document after saving. Recover an unsaved document in Word

What should you do if the Word, Excel or PowerPoint file you were working on accidentally closed? How can I make it so that I don’t have to constantly save the document? How to restore a file after a failure - for example, a power outage?

We will answer these and other questions in today's article, and you carefully read, memorize and configure your new Office so that you never lose even a bit of important information.

Setting up the autosave feature

To ensure that the documents you're working on are saved automatically every predefined period of time, and to ensure that you don't lose all your work after a crash, power outage, or accidentally closing a file without saving, turn on AutoSave.

Select an item Preservation on the menu Options tabs File.

Check the box Autosave every x min. Instead of X set the desired autosave interval. The lower the number you set, the more often the document will be saved and the higher the chance of always having it at hand latest version file.

In Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, select the checkbox Keep the last autosaved version when closing without saving.

What to do if autosave was not configured, and the document you were working on closed? The main thing is not to panic) A wonderful feature of the new Office Auto recovery will help keep your nerves.

Recovery previous versions Office files

In Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the AutoRecover feature provides an additional benefit. It can be used to restore earlier versions of files.

You can recover a file in different ways in different scenarios:

If the document is saved

Open the file you were working with.

Open menu Intelligence on the tab File(this item appears first by default) and in the section Versions select file with mark (when closing without saving).

Restore to overwrite previously saved versions.

You can also compare versions in Word by clicking Compare instead of Restore. This is very useful if you need to know the differences between the last saved version and the original document.

If the file is not saved

On the tab File in Group Intelligence click the button Version management and select Recover Unsaved Documents in Word, Recover Unsaved Workbooks in Excel, or Recover Unsaved Presentations in PowerPoint.

Select the file and click the button Open.

In the yellow bar at the top of the file, select the command Save as to save the file.

I did everything as told. opens my computer and “there are no items matching the search conditions” there is nothing....your power point is crap!

THANK YOU!!! You saved me!!! I did everything as taught))) I’m just happy!!!
I adore you!!!

Hooray! Thank you, Anna! Glad to be useful!

How to do this for Mac?

An absolutely wonderful function, especially for sclerotic people like me)))

I had an emergency shutdown of my computer, after which the file completely disappeared from the desktop (where it was located), the search engine does not find it, and Excel offers to restore a document with a similar name. is it possible to do something?

Anna, try opening Excel and doing the following:

On the File tab, in the Details group, click Version Control, and then click Recover Unsaved Workbooks in Excel. Select a file and click Open. In the yellow bar at the top of the file, select Save As to save
file.

Alla, I have a 2003 office. I can’t figure out where it is; I don’t have any parameters in the Files tab of the top panel. There are parameters in the service, but there are no file bookmarks there.

It seems to me that autosaving happened at the moment of shutdown. at least in the folder specified for autosaving. and apparently this happened precisely at the moment of replacement, because otherwise where did the file disappear?

although hope, of course, dies last...

Glory to the autosave system, hallelujah!!! Day of work restored =))

Is it possible to restore the previous version of a word file if I clicked the “save changes” button, closed the program and turned off the computer?

A very pressing question for many users is how to recover a damaged Word document, or how. I think everyone has had such a problem as losing a document. For example, you were typing something important in the program, a crash occurred, Microsoft Word crashed (closed), and after opening you find nothing, or the document does not open at all. To prevent this from happening in the future, I have prepared an article where I will show what you can use to restore a damaged version of a document.

How to recover a damaged Word document?

Let's say you tried to run a document file and saw the following error message.

This error already contains several recommendations from which you can understand what to do, for example, make sure that there is enough disk space, whether you have permission to use the document and edit it.

In this case, we can return the document using Word itself. Just open the icon of this program so that Word starts, and then go to the item on the left "Open" and select "Review".

In the explorer that opens, look for the document you want to open, click on it once so that its name appears in the field "File name". Next, you select the item from the drop-down menu "Recover text from any file" and click “Open”.

If the document is very large and you have used many design styles, it is not always successfully restored. Sometimes part of the text disappears, or there is text, but without formatting styles. The main thing, of course, is to restore the integrity of the document.

How to recover a Word document [Second method]

From what has been said above, it is clear that the first method does not always help, although it is worth using it. Let's move on to the next method.

Open Microsoft Word again and go to the File menu, then “Open” and the button "Review". Find the damaged document and click on it. Then click on the arrow where the “Open” button is and select the option there "Open and restore".

How to restore a Word backup?

Sometimes a file may get lost and you cannot find it anywhere. In this case, the program usually creates backup copies of the document; to open it, you need to proceed as follows:

Open Word and go to the “Open” section, then click on “Browse”. Remember where you saved the document and go to that folder. In the pop-up tab, select "All files", look for the lost document. Focus on the name and date. Sometimes such a document may be called “Backup copy...”.

If you fail, you can go another way. Open the search field in Windows and enter the extension of the Word backup file - *.wbk. It is more likely that such a file will be opened, but the point is that there may be more than one and the names may not match, so you will have to open and look at each one.

Autosave in Word, or how to restore a saved copy of a document

Typically, the program automatically creates backup copies of the document after a certain period of time. They are usually found along the following path: C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word.

Autosaved document names can begin with the word "Autocopy...", and the format of such files will be *.asd. To open such a file, you need to double-click on it.

Bonus option – Word file recovery program

I myself have never been interested third party programs to restore Word, but they can help if none of the above methods helped. As an example, I can cite the Hetman Office Recovery program. The utility, unfortunately, is paid; perhaps there are analogues, which I will include in this article. To use Hetman Office Recovery, just install it on your computer and check the disk for lost and damaged documents.

The program will find documents and show them in its window with real names. If you want to restore something, you select them with ticks, then it’s a matter of little things.

Are you familiar with the situation when, after sitting all day working in Word, upon completion, you are about to close the file with a clear conscience, but the cursor treacherously clicks on the “do not save” option, and all your efforts are in vain? Or while you are writing an essay and suspect nothing, the light suddenly turns off, and along with it all the unsaved data disappears? If you are reading this now, then most likely something of this kind has happened to you. But don't despair! The process of finding an unsaved document and restoring it is quite quick and simple, so you won't spend a lot of time on it.

Let's look at ways to recover Word documents for three versions: 2010, 2007 and 2003. They differ slightly, but first things first.

Word 2010 version

Fortunately, in this version the developers took care of such a problem? and you can return the lost document without any problems. Moreover, if an emergency shutdown occurs, that is, the computer turns off without your participation, the program itself will restore the file that you did not have time to save.

And if no unexpected shutdowns occurred and you simply missed pressing the “save” button, then you need to search for backup copies of documents manually. It's not that hard, below are detailed instructions.

1. Open Word and click on “File” in the upper left corner of the screen. After that, go to “Information”​

2. Find “Versions”, click and select the “Recover unsaved documents” function.

3. A folder opens in front of us where backup copies of documents are located. We look for the file we need among them and open it.

4. Save the document and continue to work on it as much as necessary!

That's it, we found it backup copy document and restored everything manually, spending a maximum of 5 minutes. You may be wondering why the unsaved file ended up in a certain folder? It's simple, in Word 2010, by default, the document autosave function works every 10 minutes. If desired, this time can be changed, for example, to autosave every 2 minutes. This is quite easy to do, let's figure it out together.

1. Go to “File” again, only this time select “Help” from the menu, and then “Options”.
2. On the right in the options menu we find “Saves” and set up a convenient interval for us at which autosave will be performed. There you can also change the path of saved files to make them easier to find.

That's all, now you know how to recover a Word 2010 document. Now let's understand how to recover an unsaved Word 2007 document. Everything is a little different there, but also quite simple and understandable.

Word 2007 version

In general, the only difference between earlier versions of word (2007, 2003) is that there is no “Information” section in the menu, from where we “pulled” the unsaved documents. However, as mentioned earlier, restoring files is still not difficult for you and me.

That's all, the restoration of the lost document has been completed! The same scheme works with the version Word 2003 .

Backup Converter

But if you cannot open the file using the methods given above, it means that the file is damaged or deleted and you need to use a backup converter. It is installed with Office, but sometimes you need to activate it manually.

Congratulations, you now have this option enabled. If it was turned on before, then you don’t need to do any of the above; let’s start using it right away. So, how to recover a deleted word document:

1. Launch word, “File” - “Open”.
2. Enter the path to the backup and click on it.
3. In the field above the “Cancel” button, set the “Text recovery” option.
4. Click on the arrow next to “Open” and select “Recovery”.

Done, we have “returned” the deleted/damaged file using the converter.

What to do if there is no backup

It happens that it disappears after the document in Word has been closed. But this situation is not hopeless; there are several ways to return your file safe and sound.

First way

1. Open “My Computer”.
2. Enter “*.asd” into the search bar. This is an extension of all unsaved word files, and the asterisk is read like any character.
3. Once your search is complete, locate the backup copy of your data in the list provided.

And if the system didn’t find anything, try using “.wdk” instead of “*.asd”. If this option does not help you, try the next method.

Second way

If the first option does not help you, then there is no automatically saved document. However, your data may still be in temporary files. So what to do:

1. Open “My Computer” again
2. Now enter “*.tmp” into the search bar.
3. We look for the file you need in the list.

Third way

Sometimes temporary data is saved with a ~ sign and a tilde at the beginning.

1. Go to the search again, in the parameters indicate the date of the last change in the file.
2. We type “~*.*” and the system searches for all documents that begin with a tilde.
3. From the entire list that appears, find the document you need.

These are all the ways by which it is possible to recover lost and unsaved files. But if none of them helped you, then try using special programs.

When you work with voluminous or important documents, you need to make sure that auto-save is configured, but it is better to save yourself to be absolutely sure of the safety of your documents.

There is an hour left before you submit or send a document that you have been working on for days, and now, instead of saving all the changes, you forget to save it, or the program closes itself. This has happened to many. This is just one of many scenarios that happen to even very experienced PC users. Fortunately, Microsoft has a mechanism for recovering documents lost before they were saved.

Step 1. Open a blank word document. Go to the "File" menu on the top panel.

Step 2. A horizontal menu will open in front of you with all the parameters related to saving, printing and other actions with the document. Go to details.

Step 3. So, in the Details section, you will see the document management area.

Click on the button as shown in the screenshot and in the pop-up menu select the option that suits you, in our case it is recovery.

Step 4. A new window will open on your screen with all the files that you did not have time or could not save in time. Select the required document and open it.

Step 5. The file you select will open in Word. Save it.

Note! The folder with unsaved documents displays only those that were lost no later than 4 days ago. After this period, all unsaved documents are permanently deleted from your computer.

Where are the unsaved documents located?

The AutoSave feature was introduced in 2010 versions of Office software. If you are working on an older computer with older versions of software, your hard drive Windows disk there is a place where unsaved files are stored Office files within four days. You can't move files out of this area, but you can open and access them for later saving.

There is an easier way, enter the word “Unsaved” in the search bar of the Start menu. The system will find the corresponding folder for you. Open it and view the contents.

In fact, this is where the system directs you when you try to recover a document using Word AutoRecovery. Again, you will see in the folder everything that was created no more than 4 days ago.

As you can see, documents that you did not manage to save are not deleted from your computer, they do not disappear into nowhere, but are stored on the computer for some time. You can also open them with standard program"Notepad" if Word is not doing its job. Unfortunately, in this case you will lose the graphics and formatting, keeping only the text, but in many cases this is already a big deal.

Option 2: Recover Lost Word Documents Using EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard

No matter which version of Word you are using, it is really difficult to complete the entire recovery process using the guides listed above Microsoft Office. EaseUS allows Word users to recover deleted documents in just three steps. Among other functions performed by this program are the following:

• Windows recovery;
• search for USB files;
• search for lost Word documents, etc.

All this can be easily done using this program. Even a beginner can handle this tool. It is applicable to Word 2013, 2001, 2007, 2003, 2002.

Note! This is paid software. However, you can download and use trial version. You don't even need to register for a trial.

Step 1. Download, install and run the program, select the drive where the unsaved documents are supposed to be located, and click on the “Scan” button to find all Word documents.

Step 2. The general scan will begin first. Upon completion, a deep scan will automatically start, helping to find more documents.

Step 3. As soon as the program scans your HDD, browse through all the recovered Word documents and select the ones you want to keep. After that, by clicking on the “Restore” button, return them back.

EaseUS document recovery software is much easier to use than any other program in this category. It is, as the name suggests, designed to make people's lives easier.

For the future

Of course, prevention is always The best way don't lose data. It starts with careful and regular conservation. Don't be lazy and do this even when you leave the computer to, for example, make tea or coffee or answer a call. This can protect you from future information loss. Although the software saves files to AutoSave from time to time, it cannot save everything. Most often, computers have a standard interval of 10 minutes. So there is a risk of losing the data you entered 10 minutes before the document was unsuccessfully closed.

If the file was ready to autosave and you closed it, you will lose the last nine minutes of work. You can change this setting so that autosave occurs more frequently.

Step 1. In older versions of the software, open Help from the File menu. In this section, select Options. In newer software Go to File > Options.

Step 2. Go to your save settings and change them as you wish. Don't forget to save the changes you made.

This mode remembers the latest version with autosave, even if you close the entire file before saving. This feature is present in all Microsoft office products.

Video - How to recover an unsaved or damaged Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint document