2020-05-21 21:09:43 / Posted by Rosa Reyes to Recover Follow @ Rosa
I had a Mac running the latest version of macOS High Sierra and was working on my dissertation in Word, pressing “Save” button regularly. Suddenly, A message came up saying Word had to quit unexpectedly. When I open the word document again, some contents were unsaved. Please tell me how I can recover unsaved word document on Mac.
I have a very important Word 2016 file that has been deleted. I cannot find them where I had saved it as well as in the Trash bin. The word document might have been permanently deleted. Is there any way to salvage this file?
If you are in similar situations, we have the solutions for you. In this article, we will introduce all the fixes on Mac word document recovery, no matter you want to recover unsaved Word document on Mac, or restore lost even retrieve a previous version of Word document on mac in Microsoft Office 2011, 2016 or Office 2019.
When working on a Word document on mac, a sudden system/program crash or power-off will leave you no time to save the word file, which may bring a nightmare to make your hours of efforts to be nothing. Didn't save Word document? Yet, even this happened, it is still possible to recover a word document that was not saved on mac, and this can be quite easy especially with auto-recovery word mac. Besides the solution of auto recovery Word on mac, there are also 2 alternatives to recover a Word document that wasn’t saved on Mac.
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.
Here, we need to make sure if the AutoRecover is ON, so we can choose an appropriate method to recover unsaved Word document on Mac successfully. Also, you can configure the settings as following to save every 5 minutes or shorter interval.
Since the AutoRecover is ON by default, you can use this feature to recover the unsaved Word documents on mac now.
For different versions of word document, the AutoRecover files are saved at different places, you can refer to following to find where the AutoRecover files are saved:
For Office Word 2016/2019:
/Users/
For Office Word 2011:
/Users/
tips: For users who cannot find the Library folder, open Finder, press Shift+Command+H to go to Home, right click on “Users” and choose “Show View Options”, then check the box before “Show Library Folder”.
Or Go to Finder>Go to Folder, input the AutoRecover location to find the files.
If you can’t recover unsaved word document via AutoSave, then you’d better check your Temporary folder.
Steps to Recover Unsaved Word Document on Mac from Temp Folder
Though those non-text contents cannot be displayed in TextEdit, your newly added text will be saved.
If you have turned the AutoRecover feature ON, there is a quite simple but easily over-looked method to recover the word document that wasn’t saved due to force quit or power off on mac---to open a Word document.
Situation 1: The unsaved word document is caused by force quit, program or system crash, but the Mac is not powered off.
In this case, no matter you can find the unsaved file or not, can remember the file name or not, you just need to open any one of your word documents, then the Office Word will be launched, and all the previously opened Word documents will be opened. Find the Word document, go to File>Save.
Situation 2: The unsaved word document is caused by sudden power off.
In this case, don’t be panic. Restart your Mac immediately, once you see the desktop, you will find all the word documents left unsaved are opened. Then, go to File>Save and make your word documents saved. But before saving your Word documents on mac, you are recommended to wait patiently until all the programs that run automatically when the Mac is ON have completed the start, since they will require a large RAM and may slow down the Word processing, even may bring risks of Office Word crash when lots of programs are running behind simultaneously.
In this video, you will learn how to recover an unsaved word document on mac using AutoRecover and Temporary folder.
However, even if you have tried all these methods to recover an unsaved word document on mac, nothing happened and you cannot even figure out why you just don’t have the luck to get it back.
There are so many reasons lead to such a recovery failure, your mac settings, your way using Office Word, etc. But does that mean you will have no way to recover the unsaved Word document? No, you can still try a piece of data recovery software to find out the word document smartly and retrieve it from those hidden word documents. In addition, those data recovery programs basically come with a free trial, it cost you nothing, why not have a go? So, keep reading the following part to find back you unsaved word document.
There are some times we just lost or accidentally deleted a Word document, here we recommend 3 ways to recover lost or deleted word documents on mac.
There may be multiple ways to recover a deleted or lost word document on mac, but the best way to do a Word recovery with high success rate is using a professional data recovery software. To make things easier, here I will recommend you the best word document recovery tool for Mac– Cisdem Data Recovery.
The Data Recovery for Mac is designed to safely get all your deleted, lost or formatted word documents and other files like photos, videos, audios, archives back from your Mac hard drive and other storage devices.
To recover word documents on Mac, choose among the 5 data recovery solutions. If you are not sure which one to choose. You can choose Basic Data Recovery or Advanced Data Recovery. The latter is recommended, but it will take a bit more time than the former.
In addition to the internal hard drive on Mac, the data recovery also recovers data from external hard drive and other storage media like SD cards and USB drive, you only need to insert it on your Mac. Click the scan button.
Select the word documents you want to recover, preview before recovery. If it is the one you want to recover, hit "Recover" button to recover the word document to your mac.
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.
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 Google Drive, iCloud, OneDrive, Dropbox, the steps to recover Word documents from these backups are quite easy and similar. Here we take iCloud and Google Drive to demonstrate how to do the online Word recovery.
We all know that Mac Preview builds in the feature allowing users to revert to previous versions, but unfortunately, Office Word on Mac is not able to do so.
According to Microsoft Office, “Version history in Office only works for files stored in OneDrive or SharePoint Online”. So, Office itself doesn’t help to recover preview version of Word document on Mac 2011/2016/2019, but we still have some trick to restore a previous version of a word document on mac.
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.
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.
Steps to Recover Previous Version of Word Document on Mac
Above all are the methods about how to recover word document on Mac. And developing a good habit will help us save much energy. The best methods to protect your files are saving them in time and doing the archive regularly. If you have any data recovery issues, Cisdem Data Recovery is always a good choice to get the issues fixed.
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2 Comments Leave a Reply
So far, the fullest guide to recover a word document, I managed to recover the docx file in my icloud backup. Thanks.
Awesome. This really helped me and I appreciate your work. Happy New Year 2018!