How to recover a lost unsaved or corrupted Word document.When writing, nothing breaks -style flow more quickly or completely than losing work to a or unexpected power outage. The original document that you created is then deleted.ĭescription of how Word creates temporary files Therefore you could search your system for files of this name and then use the same "Drag and Drop" technique to view the data in Notepad to recover the data.Īnother interesting thing to note is that when a change is made to a document that requires a temp file to be created, when you press the save button all the temp files are merged together into one file and the file is renamed to what you called it. This is because when any info is copied it is sent to a temp file with the name ~wrlxxxx.tmp. If you have been working on a file for hours and the document was created via copying and pasting or at one point had cut the entire page or document to paste some place and then placed something else on the clip board, the data may not have been lost. These files can also be found in the following locations:Ĭ:\Users\\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFilesĬ:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles
Find your file and double click on it to open.
On Windows 7 and Vista, the locations will be
You can control this time in Options under the "Save" tab. The default auto save time for word documents is 10 minutes. There are others, but these are the ones most likely to contain data that can be recovered.įinding and using the temporary and auto save files These are good ones to look for to find some lost info. This temporary file will have a few different letters after the tilde (or squiggly line " ~ "). If the file is stored on a network drive then it will be temporarily created there. This can be either in the windows temp directory, in "C:\ Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Microsoft". When a new file is started a temporary file is created. Therefore you may want to experiment before you rely on this information. Microsoft have changed the way AutoSave and Auto Recover works in different versions of Office. However many people don't know how to use these features or that they even exist.Įven if you don't have these features enabled, you can sometimes recover data from the various temporary files that are created by Office while you are working on the document. Microsoft Office has extensive AutoSave and Auto Recovery options that allow you to rescue your work in the event that it is lost due to a power failure, system crash or plain human error.