Unsaved Word Document is lost

[Amanda2929]

Hi everyone,
I was working on a word document when my mac shut down unexpectedly.
Once I restarted it and opened word, it was not there and gave me no option to pick up where I left off.
I have followed the advice of looking into the autorecovery folder, this is also empty.
Has anyone had an issue similar, why would the auto recovery folder be entirely empty?
Thank you!

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

Microsoft Office AutoRecovery works intermittently at best in my experience. Depending on the type of freeze/crash, it may or may not give Word the opportunity to save to the AutoRecovery folder.

Unfortunately, in the scenario you describe, there isn't any way to recover the file, unless you possibly have an external Time Machine external drive connected that may have saved a copy.

Sorry,

C

 

[deliriouscat]

Amanda probably won't get back to check on this forum thread, but to provide a solution for those who want to recover their unsaved Word Document - use the Disk Drill app.
It saved the day for me several times when I thought I'd lost my files completely.

If you've never used it before, here's a quick guide on using this app:

How to recover an unsaved word document on Mac

When you need to recover Word document Mac computers don’t respond well to the retrieval process. Microsoft Word is a third party app, and Apple doesn’t automatically save its documents to icloud as it does with apps like Pages.

setapp.com