How to Recover Unsaved Word Documents on Mac

Many newer Mac word processing apps have the ability to auto save themselves after a certain number of minutes. But sometimes, something will go wrong that you may have to exit the app before it can auto save the current document.

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If you use Microsoft Word for Mac, then you probably know that it will auto save your document every 10 minutes so (god forbid) something happens with your Mac and/or Word, you can recover the last 10 minutes.

There are two ways to recover a document.  I’ll go over the easiest way first and then get into a technical way.

How to recover a crashed document (The easy way):

• When MS Word crashes, relaunch it. 
• The document should re-load itself.
• That’s it. 

How to recover a crashed document (Techie way):

• Go into Finder.
• Select the “Go” menu at the top and select “Go To Folder”
• Optionally, hit Command+Shift+G from the Finder to bring up Go To Folder.
• Enter this command: ~/Library/Containers/com.Microsoft/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery/
  
• Press [Return].
• Open the document(s) or file(s) found in the AutoRecovery directory, search for the file that you’re looking to recover.
• That’s it. 

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Dan Uff

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