How to Recover Word Documents on Mac?

 I had a Mac running latest version of OS X, i.e. El Capitan and was working on my dissertation in Word, pressing Save regularly. Suddenly, A message came up saying MS Word had to quit unexpectedly. Please tell me how I can recover word document? - Question from Quora

I have a very important Word 2010 file that has been deleted. Cannot find them where I had saved it as well as in the recycle bin. I have run data recovery software that sees the file and can recover it only to be junk. What is the best way to salvage this file? - Question from Quora

In our work or study, the word, excel and Power Point are the most common applications to record, save and transmit information. But with the frequently use, we will meet the situations above. In this article, we will introduce the ways about word document recovery what includes how to recover unsaved word documents and recover deleted word documents on Mac.

Part one: How to recover unsaved word documents on Mac?

The system crash or sudden outage will make your effort be nothing. It not only affects the work efficiency, but if the document is unique, there will be irreparable harm. If you meet these situation and need to recover the unsaved word documents, please follow these ways to try word document recovery.

With the document updates, the document could auto save the document every other 10 minute, so just find the AutoSave, you will get the document you did not save before.

For different Mac system and the different version of word document, the files of AutoSave saved at different places, we introduce two common places, and you can have try on both of them.

# Method one:  Recover unsaved word documents from AutoSave

Before you use this way, you should make sure that you have set the AutoSave interval, and your word document has ever saved once.

The path to set AutoSave interval: Word > Choice > Save

If you have ever set the AutoRecover, then just follow the way

1. Go to folder
2. Choose Go, then go to folder
3. Enter “/Users/”
4. Choose your user name and enter

You will find the path “/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/Office 2011 AutoRecovery”

Different version of office, the path may be different, for the office 2016, the path is  /Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery/

PS: if you cannot find the Library, you need to use “chflags nohidden ~/Library/ in Terminal” to no hidden library.

# Method two: Recover word document in Temporary Folder

1. Find the TEMP (Open the finder and search “terminal”)
2. Enter “open $TMPDIR”
3. Open the  “Temporaryitems”
4. Open the WordWorkfiles with text edit application, you may can find the lost documents

Part two: How to recover deleted word documents on Mac?

Except how to recover unsaved word documents, we will often meet the solution that we need to recover the deleted documents. In this part, let’s know how to recover deleted word documents.

# Method one: Check the trash

This is the first thing we should do, if you do not empty the trash, search and recover the files through the name, data or type.

# Method two: Use Data recovery software

If you empty the trash, use the data recovery software will be the best choice. In the data recovery software market, there is too much software for us to choose the best one. Here, I will recommend the best file recovery software for Mac – Cisdem Data Recovery.

The Data Recovery for Mac is designed to help safely get all your deleted, lost or formatted photos, videos, documents or emails back from your Mac hard drive and other storage devices.

• Quick Scan & Deep Scan to meet different scan requirement
• Four scan mode can recover the specific types of files
• Remaining time help you take control the word document recovery
• Preview and choose your target files to recover only

Follow these steps to recover word documents.

Step 1: Download the Data Recovery below

Step 2: Open the software to choose Quick Scan or Deep Scan

If you want to recover the documents on Mac that deleted recently, you can choose quick scan, otherwise, you can choose the deep scan. The speed of quick scan is very quickly, so you can try first before Deep Scan.

Step 3: Choose the disk you want to scan

Except the hard disk drive on Mac, the data recovery also support recover data from external drive, you only need to insert it on your Mac.

Step 4: Choose the data’s types you want to recover

The types only support in the Deep Scan, if you know the types of you files needed to be recover, you can choose the coopers ponding mode, it can save much time for you. For example, if you do the word document recovery, choose the Media mode.

Step 4: Preview and choose files you want to recover

Final words

Above all are the methods about how to recover word documents. But the best methods to protect your files are save them in time and do the archive regularly. What we need to is just click “Save” when we finish one paragraph or stop to edit documents. The shortcut key of save is Command+S. Develop a good habit will help us save much energy.