How-To Tutorial: Find/Recover Lost/Unsaved Microsoft Word Document/File AutoRecover

This is a how-to tutorial video to recover your lost or unsaved Microsoft Word document/file using the AutoRecover feature.
(No guarantee made.)

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FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Have you ever been typing in Word and, all of a sudden, either the program froze or your computer went into a restart, and you lost portions of your document?

This has happened to me, and it is extremely stressful.

You go into files. You look into your history. You pull up the document and, like, half of it is gone.

Okay. Don't panic yet. You might be able to still recover your file, your document.

If you've set it up to do an auto save, but you didn't see the entire document in the history file, this is what you can do to try to recover that document.

Click on the Windows icon. In the search, type "AppData." Click on this file. Then click on the file "Roaming." Scroll down to "Microsoft." Then "Word."

In this Word file, which I'm not going to open because I don't want to show my files, you're going to want to look at the most recent file, so under "Date Modified" in this Word folder. Click on it and open it.

If you're having trouble opening it, copy and save it to your desktop. Then open Microsoft Word, and then go into your files and open that file. That should pull it up. And it should, if not the entire document, most of the document should have been saved.

Now, the way that you can change the settings is by going to "Tools," "Options," and, under this "Save" tab, here is where it says "Save AutoRecover info every:" and I set it up for every minute. Click on "OK."

As you can see, it doesn't give you an option of where exactly you can save those AutoRecover files. I'm going to show you in the later versions of Word where you actually can change that.

Here we are in the latest version or the more updated version of Word. And to change the file that those recovery files are saved in, you're going to click on "File." And what I'm going to do here, it's going to look weird, but I'm going to open this Paint program. That's going to hide my files, so you can see what I'm doing without seeing my files.

Click on "File." Then it brings you automatically up to my "Recent" files. And again, I'm blocking that out by using my Paint program.

Down at the bottom it says "Recover Unsaved Documents." You might be able to find the document you're looking for right here by clicking on this folder. If not, in order to find those folders, again, follow the same process I showed before.

To change the settings of where that file location is in the newer versions of Word, click on "Options." Then go down to where it says "Save." Here you can check "Save AutoRecover information every:" and I set this up for every two minutes. Again, you can put it to whatever increment you'd like.

Here you actually are given the option to change where that file location is. As I said before, it was under AppData/Roaming/Microsoft/Word. Here you can change it to whatever file location you'd like. Click "OK," and it saves that information for you.

I hope this information has been useful to you. And I hope that you were able to recover your Word document without so much stress and without having to retype most of the document.

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