Recover unsaved documents in Word [ Office 2010 ]

Many a times it so happens that you accidentally loose a document which you had been editing because of sudden machine failure or shutdown. Now, There is a cool feature in Microsoft Office Word 2010 which allows you to recover unsaved document.

Update : This is possible in all the office products. You will have to navigate to Info > Manage Versions.

Recover Unsaved Documents in Word

To clear your doubt there is a direct menu for that but instead you will have to got to Back Stage and select Info > Manage Versions  > Recover unsaved documents. If you are editing a document which has some recoverable document, it shows up right next to Manage versions else, it just says that there are not previous versions of this file.

Find unsaved document in Word 2010

This is possible because Office documents are backed up as you edit and are available in your Roaming Profile of Windows, in .asd format. The feature makes use of this feature to recover and give you option to recover documents.

24 COMMENTS

  1. my document was saved but somehow disapeared. I check my temp files and roaming I spent an hour on the phonewith microsoft (as the tookovermy computer) and no one knowshow orwhythis happened so I can’t be sure it won’t happen again. Any idea? PS if you know how to find the paper I wrote I would really appreciate the insight.

  2. THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    It worked perfect.
    You don’t know how much time and effort that saved me.

    Thanks again,
    Bill

  3. Thank you so much! This was extraordinarily helpful and saved me almost 2 hours of re-work!

  4. Tried following your advice but I edited a document that I’d downloaded and opened (not saved) from my hotmail. I saved as I went along but never did a save as and wasn’t prompted to save when I closed the document, is there anything I can do to retrieve this work?

  5. i am trying to locate and retrieve a doc i was typing in word ’10. while i was typing a message popped up and kept asking me if i wanted to save the doc 3 times. i said yes then it asked me if i wanted to stay on the page, i said yes. Next thing i knew, the doc disappeared.
    i was advised to look under recent documents, and i did; however i am only getting a limited number of docs and i think i need to see more docs. how can i get additional recent docs??

  6. i cannot find my document anywhere, including there. I created it about 12 hours ago. I remember trying to save it as something, but it had a comma, so it said i couldn’t save it as that. I don’t remember what I did next. I do know that I spent hours on it and clicked save several times. I shut down my computer when I was finished. it’s not showing in that location you mention or in temp files. I did a computer search of my last name, which is in the document 3 times, including the first line. If it helps, I did a mail merge thing in the document. oddly, i can find the name/address file that i saved for mail merge feature.. I have word 2010 starter on windows 7. please help.

  7. hello, please i thought i saved this file on my word, but as it turns out it didnt save. i can see it on my recent documents in MS word 2010, but when i go to recover it, it says that my unsaved folder is empty. what do i do?

  8. I spent most of yesterday with 3 Word 10 documents open that I left open because I had not finished my work yet. Today I got back to it only to find that someone had shut down my computer and lost all of my work! I was able to retrieve the term paper outline I was working on but when I tried all of the above steps to retrieve an unsaved document containing ALL of my notes and resources, it is nowhere. Please help! This is due today and most of my work was done but now I have to start all over unless you know what to do.

  9. Does anyone know how to recover a file that was saved on Microsoft word but it can not be retrieved ANYWAY in the computer??

  10. Ashish Mohta THANK YOU SO MUCH..!!!!!!! I was able to follow your directions nd recovered an important document. I appreciate your knowledge. I take my hat of for you though I am a lady 🙂 Thank you again… I feel better now that I was able to recover the document with your help.. 🙂

  11. how do I locate my unsaved word document my computer shut itself down when the battery died & I need to find it asap please please it was almost done…HELP!!!

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