How to Recover Previous or Unsaved Word Document on Mac (without AutoRecovery)?

After a long process of editing a Word document on your Mac, it will be quite frustrating to leave it unsaved. When encountering this situation, take a deep breath and calm down first, don’t let the panic take your files away forever.

It is generally advised that you should use the AutoRecover feature in Word app to restore the unsaved Word documents, it works like life savior. But we are anticipating that some users don’t enable this feature or have tried AutoRecovery but failed. In these circumstances, we will look at some quick and easy ways to recover unsaved Word documents on Mac without AutoRecovery.

We will mainly focus on unsaved Word recovery in this guide, but if you want to restore a previous version of the Word file, or your files are just deleted/lost, the steps are also listed.  

 

Here are the quick links for the solutions under different situations:

 

4 Solutions for Unsaved Word Document Recovery on Mac

Word crashed suddenly and the Word document was left unsaved on your Mac? Well, if you have enabled AutoSave feature in your Word app, once you realized the Word file is not saved, you can immediately open the Word file or relaunch the app to restore with this AutoSave tool. 

If reopening or relaunching doesn’t work, there are 4 solutions for unsaved Word document recovery on Mac. 

#1. How to Recover Unsaved Word Document on Mac without AutoRecovery Easily?

If you haven’t enabled AutoRecovery, or you want a recovery solution with higher recovery rate, you can use dedicated Mac Word data recovery software. To make things easier, here we will recommend you the best Word document recovery tool for Mac – Cisdem Data Recovery. 

Cisdem Data Recovery for Mac is designed to safely get all your deleted, lost, formatted even unsaved Word documents back from your Mac hard drive, and other storage devices, and it does more:

• Recover more than 200 types of files
• Repair damaged Word, Excel, PPT, video and image files
• Deal with different data loss situations: deletion, formatting, system crash, virus attack, etc.
• Support all kinds of internal or external storage devices
• Preview files before recovery
• Restore files from iCloud
• Recover files to local drive or Cloud
• Recover files in a high success rate

How to Recover Unsaved Word Document on Mac without AutoRecovery?

1. Free download Cisdem Data Recovery below. Install and run it on your Mac.
   Free Download macOS 10.9 or later
2. Go to Hardware Disk, choose the hard drive where you lost the Word documents. Click on Search for lost files to start the scanning. 
3. Go to Unsaved Documents folder to find your unsaved Word files, or go to Documents > Doc or Docx folder to locate the unsaved, deleted or lost Word documents. To find an unsaved Word file quickly, you can also use the filter tool or enter keyword in the search box. 
4. Double click on the Word file to preview it, or open with TextEdit. Then select them and click Recover to restore the unsaved or deleted Word documents on Mac.
5. (Optional) If you cannot preview a file, the file may be damaged, Cisdem will auto repair it and allows you to save the repaired file.

 

#2. How to Recover Unsaved Word Document on Mac with AutoRecovery

If you have enable AutoSave in Word for Mac, we can restore unsaved Word documents from auto recover location. AutoRecover is a feature of Microsoft Word series helping users to save the files automatically when working (editing or modifying) on a Word document. By default, Microsoft Word automatically saves the files every 10 minutes. 

Where Do Unsaved Word Documents Go on Mac?

For Office Word 2016/2019/2021/Office 365

/Users/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery

For Office Word 2011:

/Users/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/Office 2011 AutoRecovery

How to Recover Unsaved Word Document on Mac with AutoRecovery?

1. Go to Finder > Go to Folder, input the AutoRecover location to find the files.
2. Open the AutoRecover word document with Office Word on Mac, then save the file.

 

#3. Recover Unsaved Word Docs from the Mac Temporary Folder

If you haven’t enabled AutoRecover, or you have tried AutoRecover but it didn’t work, you can launch Terminal on Mac to restore unsaved Word document on Mac after crash, from the Temporary Folder.

1. Open Terminal by going to Finder > Application > Terminal.
2. Enter open $TMPDIR in the window and press Enter.
3. Open the Temporaryitems.
4. Open the ~Word Word files with TextEdit application, then copy and paste the text to Office Word.

 

#4. Recover Word Document Saved over Mac from Recovered Items Folder

It’s possible for Mac to move the temporary files to Trash bin after rebooting. Thus you can try to restore a Word document not saved on Mac from the Recovered items folder in Trash bin.

1. Enter the Trash bin on your Mac Dock.
2. If Recovered items folder is present, double-click it to find the unsaved Word file and achieve the Word document recovery.

 

How to Recover Previous Version of Word Document on Mac

Want to revert to a previous version of a Word document on Mac? It is quite easy. In this era of digital documents prevails, both operating systems and document processors build in the feature to save a copy of different versions and allows reverting to a previous version easily. There are 3 ways to consider.

#1. Browse Version History

We all know that Mac Preview builds in the feature allowing users to revert to previous versions, likewise, we can also get the similar feature within Word for Mac. But note that Version history in Office only works for files stored in OneDrive or SharePoint Online.

For Office 2016 & 2019 & 2021:

1. Open the Word file whose previous version you want to restore.
2. Go to File > Browse Version History.
3. From the list of all previous versions of your current file, choose the one you want and click Restore.

For Office 365:

1. Select and right click the document > choose Version history.
2. Find the version you desire > move to the three-dots icon and click Restore to recover the previous file version.

 

#2. Use Time Machine on Mac

If you have turned the Time Machine ON, your Word documents will be well backed up and you are able to get a previous version of your Word document.

1. Connect the Time Machine backup drive to your Mac, click the Time Machine icon from the menu bar and Enter.
2. Open the folder where you store the Word file. Or you can go to Finder > Documents, then find the Word file.
3. You can use the timeline on the edge of the screen to check all the versions of the Word document, then select and press Space Bar to preview.
4. Click Restore to get the previous Word document back on Mac.

 

#3. Manually Find the Previous Version  

If the Word document is not created by you, go ask for the original Word document from the sender.

If you are the one created the Word document, it is much likely that the current Word document has went through different versions, so track down to see if you have sent out previous version before via emails/iCloud, or deleted in Trash Bin, if yes, get them back and rename it.

 

Extended: How to Recover Deleted or Lost Word Document on Mac

There are some times we just lost or accidentally deleted a Word document and want to recover. Cisdem also supports recovering deleted and lost Word documents as well, but if you want to recover deleted Word documents on Mac for free, here we recommend 3 ways for you.

#1. Recover Deleted Word Documents in Mac Trash

When the Word document is lost or deleted, the first thing you should do is to check the Trash bin. Since, all the removed items are transferred to Trash bin by default on Mac. Here are the steps to recover from Mac Trash.

1. Go to Trash bin.
2. Right click on the deleted Word file, choose Put Back.

 

#2. Recover Deleted Word Document on Mac with Terminal

We can also use Terminal to recover deleted Word documents without checking and putting back files in Trash bin app. Though Terminal will permanently delete a file from Mac, it allows Mac users to recover a trashed file with cd. Trash command.

1. Run Terminal on your Mac.
2. Input cd .Trash and press Enter.
3. Input mv filename ../ and press Enter.
   For example, my file name is "Unsaved word recovery mac" with extension .docx, so the command would be "mv Unsaved\ word\ recovery\ mac.docx ../".
4. Then find the recovered Word document in Home folder.

#3. Recover Deleted or Lost Word Document on Mac from Backup

In fact, if you have a good habit to back up files via online storage services, that would be much easier to get the lost or deleted word document back. Though there are many online storage services, such as Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox, the steps to recover Word documents from these backups are quite easy and similar. And much probably, you may have backed your Word document in OneDrive or iCloud, here we take these 2 tools to demonstrate how to do the online Word document recovery.

Via OneDrive

1. Go to OneDrive website, login into your Microsoft account.
2. Go to My Files in the navigation pane, find Word documents that you lost or deleted on your Mac.
3. Download and save the copy to your Mac.
4. (Optional) If you cannot find the Word document in My Files folder, go to Recycle bin, select the deleted Word docs and click Restore.

 

Via iCloud

1. Go to iCloud website or app, login into your iCloud account.

2. Find and click on the Word file you want to restore to your Mac and click the Download icon to move it.

3. (Optional) If you cannot find the deleted Word document, go to Settings > Advanced > Restore Files, choose Word document you want to recover, then click Restore File to recover.

 

Final Words

We’ve already put together a comprehensive guide here for you to restore a Word document on Mac, which contains multiple helpful options under different situations. Basically, you can recover an unsaved Word document easily with AutoRecovery, but if this doesn’t work or you need a reliable long-term data recovey solution, you should consider Cisdem, which is well worth paying to rescue your files when data loss happens.