Two Ways to Successfully Recover Unsaved Word Document on Windows

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

Losing Word documents is one of the most serious computer-related disasters that can quickly drain the color from your face. Image how regretted you will feel if you have written a long thesis but suddenly lose it due to system crash or Microsoft Word crash. With a little luck, you can use the latest backup of the lost/unsaved Word document. Read on the article and tr 2 ways to recover unsaved Word document if you do not have a backup copy.

• Use MiniTool Power Data Recovery
• Recover the previous version of Word document through Microsoft Word

Part 1. Recover the Unsaved Word Document by Using MiniTool Power Data Recovery

To recover an unsaved Word document in Windows 10 or other Windows OS, please follow the 3 steps.

Just a kind reminder: If you want to recover a deleted Word document, please go to check the Recycle Bin first. If the file exists in the Recycle Bin, simply drag it out to the desktop.

Step 1: Download MiniTool Power Data Recovery to your Windows computer, install the program, and launch it. You could see the main interface, please choose one function option from the panel on the left-hand side.

1. If your deleted/lost Word document was previously saved on a local partition, please select the first option –This PC.
2. If your document was saved in a USB flash drive/SD card, please connect the device to your PC and then hit on the second option – Removable Disk Drive.
3. To recover corrupt Word files from an inaccessible hard disk, you are supposed to select the third one – Hard Disk Drive.

Step 2: Select the target partition or disk to scan → click on the ”Scan” button.

If you want to search for only Word files and get a quick scan result, please do the following things:

1. Click on the Settings button(see picture below).
2. Now check Office WORD Document (*.doc) and Office2007 Word Document (*.docx) under Extra search for known file types.
3. Hit on the OK button to confirm → click on the Scan button to start detecting all the Word documents.

Step 3: Preview all the Word documents to be recovered from the scan result. Afterward, click on the Save button to choose a storage path for storing them. At last, click on the OK button and wait for the recovery process to complete.

Also read: Use MiniTool Power Data Recovery to do hard drive recovery.

Part 2. Recover Unsaved Word Document Using the AutoSave Feature

The AutoSave function built-in Microsoft Word can also be used for recovering Word documents from the automatically saved versions or unsaved documents.

Tutorial on How to Recover a Word Document that Was Saved Over

When you realize that you need a Word document that was saved over, you are supposed to recover the previous version of that Word document. There are 7 steps in the recovery process.

1. Make sure that Word document is opening.
2. Hit the “File” button at the upper left corner.
3. You will see the file window will appear and the “Info” option is chosen by default.
4. There are 3 sections provided under Info: Permissions, Prepare for Sharing, and Versions. All the versions that are saved automatically will be shown to you here, ordered by the saving time.
5. Check the saving time and decide which Word document version you need.
6. Select one version, click on it and Microsoft Word will open a new Word window for you. In that new window, there are two options – Compare and Restore.
7. Click on the “Restore”  button to overwrite the last saved version with the version that you have chosen just now.

How Can I Recover a File that I Didn’t Save?

If you have made many changes to a Word document but closed it without saving, entire versions of documents can be lost. When you reopen the Word document, you cannot find any automatically saved versions in the Info window by clicking the File menu. How can you recover the unsaved document in this situation? The good news is, you can try the Recover Unsaved Documents feature or open the AutoRecover file location to check.

Where to find the Recover Unsaved Documents feature?

1. Open the Word document → Click on the File menu at the upper left corner.
2. Now find the “Manage Document” option under Info.
3. After that, click on Manage Document and select Recover Unsaved Documents.
4. Browse the recent unsaved files and select a file to open it.
5. At last, click on the “Save As” button at the top of the document to save the changes.

How to open the ASD file on the computer?

You can also open the AutoRecover file location and check whether your needed documents exist here. In general, the AutoSaved Word document files will be stored on your computer with a name formed by the original file name, Unsaved tag and some special symbols as well as numbers ( see the example picture below). You could see the AutoRecover files are saved as ASD files.

Where are AutoRecover files saved on the computer?

Follow the steps below if you want to find the location of AutoRecover files.

1. Click on the File option in the menu bar→ then choose Options from the left-hand pane of the window.
2. Select  “Save” in the Word Options window.
3. Go to the Save documents section on the right side.
4. Find the AutoRecover file location and check out the storage path after it. The default path is: C:UsersUsernameAppDataRoamingMicrosoftWord, but you are allowed to change it as per your needs.

If you find the document that you need in that location, simply double click to open the ASD file in Microsoft Office Word. Then you will see two choices – Compare and Restore. If it is exactly the file you need, please select Restore to recover the unsaved Word document.

How Shall I turn on AutoRecover in Word?

In fact, the AutoRecover feature is enabled by default. Under the Save documents section, both Save AutoRecover information every _ minutes and Keep the last autosaved version if I close without saving options are checked by default. But you could uncheck these 2 options if you want.

Is it possible to change the time interval of AutoRecover?

The default time interval is set to 10 minutes, you can manually change it to an integer between 1 and 120.

• The timer will be initialized each time when the new modification has been made to the Word document after completing the last auto-save or manual saving. When a specified time interval is reached, a new version of the current Word document will be generated.
• If you prefer to save current changes by pressing the Save button, the timer will be cleared and stop working until new changes have been made to your Word document.

Recover an Unsaved Word Document after it Crashes

When working on a Word document, sometimes you may encounter a sudden Microsoft Office Word app crash or a Windows system crash. Do not panic, try to recover unsaved Word document after a crash in this way.

1. First, restart the Microsoft Office Word or restart the computer.
2. Go to the original place to find and open your Word document.
3. Take a look at the Document Recovery section on the left-hand pane of Word.
4. There should be many files that Word has recovered for you and they are available in the list, now you need to decide which file you need.
5. Right click on that file and choose “Save As”.
6. Choose a location to save it, at last, click on the “Save” button.

Some more tips:

• If you see many files in the list and you don’t know which one to save, look at the date and creation time under the name of each file, they will give you a clue.
• If you see many different versions of the same file, you had better choose the one with the most recent time because it contains the most recent changes.
• In case you want to see the detailed content and changes, click on a file to open the document directly. You can resume working with the file you choose or save it first.
• Please close the Document Recovery pane when you are sure all your documents are recovered.