Four Ways to Recover Your ‘Lost’ Work in Microsoft Word

There’s little worse than losing an hour or two of hard work, just by clicking on the wrong button or pressing the wrong key in Microsoft Word—a mistake that sees your well-crafted document (or a sizable portion of it) disappear before your eyes.

A slip of the fingers isn’t the only way you can potentially lose work, either. Maybe you just have the misfortune to be busy at your computer when a power outage happens—taking your desktop, Microsoft Word, and your unsaved work along with it.

However, before you begin all over again, there are some tricks you can try to bring your work back.

Use Undo (Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z)

Sometimes, all you need is the undo command—hit Ctrl+Z (Windows) or Cmd+Z (macOS) to undo your last action in Word. It might be enough to restore that table you accidentally deleted, or bring back that huge block of text you moved to the clipboard and have since lost track of.

This won’t save you from a power outage, and it doesn’t include all actions (it won’t bring back a file you’ve closed, for example). However, it’ll work a lot of the time when you’ve made a mistake, and Word always keeps a record of your last 100 actions in the app, so you can go back a fair way.

There’s also an undo button up in the top left corner of the Word interface: Click on this to undo the last action, or click the arrow next to it to see a list of previous actions and choose where you want to go back to. To the right of the undo button is the redo button, which works the same way but in the opposite direction.

Open previous file versions

Accessing previous versions in Word.
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Word also has a file version history feature you can utilize to bring back lost work: It essentially saves past versions of your document at regular intervals, so you can go back in time, and even all the way back to the file’s creation. It’s like a super undo, which works between app restarts as well.

In Word for Windows, you can find these older incarnations of your document by heading to File > Info > Version History. If you’re using Word on macOS, it’s File > Browse Version History. A new sidebar opens on the right, showing all the available previous versions, and the date and time they were saved.

There is a caveat to this, though, which is you have to have your document saved in the cloud (in OneDrive) for this to work. If you’re working with a local file that’s only saved on your computer and you try and access version history, you’ll be prompted to save it to OneDrive instead (which will turn on version history).

Find unsaved documents on your system

Unsaved documents are sometimes still available.
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Word actually saves files temporarily to your computer every so often, so if the program crashes without warning, you should see an autorecovery dialog pop up the next time you load Word, asking if you want to recover the old file. If not, you can see partially saved files by clicking Click File > Info > Manage Document > Recover Unsaved Documents.

That’s only for Windows, however—if you’re on macOS, you’re relying on the auto-recovery process. Word for both Windows and macOS lets you set how often auto-recovery files are saved: Head to File > Options > Save (Windows) or Word > Preferences > Save (macOS). The default is every 10 minutes, but you can adjust this if needed.

If you’re still not seeing your file, you can try checking the temporary cache folder manually. On Windows, check “C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word” or “C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles.” On macOS try “/Users//Library/Containers/com.Microsoft/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery”—adding in your own username where relevant.

Save your work to the cloud

OneDrive gives you various extra options—including AutoSave.
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These days, Microsoft Word will tend to push you to save your work in OneDrive in the cloud. There are multiple benefits for this, including the version history feature mentioned above, and the option to collaborate on documents with other people. It also enables another handy feature: AutoSave.

This is exactly what it sounds like, and means that every time something is changed in your document, it quickly syncs to the cloud. You’ll see the AutoSave button in the top left hand corner enabled when it’s active, and the document name at the top of the app window will indicate when saves are in progress.

Should Word or your PC crash, your work should be safe. AutoSave is enabled by default for files saved to OneDrive, but you can customize this behavior by heading to File > Options > Save on Windows) or Word > Preferences > Save on macOS.