How to find a lost file in Microsoft Office Autorecovery

I'm in desperation mode. Word crashed and recovered all documents except the absolutely critical one that I need. I went through all the steps and can see hidden dirs, but can't find any .asd files and don't see the "Files created in last 7 days" anywhere. I have nothing in terms of temp files, yet autorecover is set for every 10 mins and i lost 8 hours of data. I note that it doesn't look like an autorecover folder was specified in the autosave. Any thoughts at all??

Hi - that's a horrible feeling, but it may well be there somewhere.

Try going into the Finder and create a new Smart Folder. When you click this a narrow "Search" bar appears with a "+" sign. Click the "+" and select "Files Modified in" then specify the last 1 day.

If you've unhidden your files, that will bring up everything it can find, and it may be in there. (As long as you had originally saved your file, then in my experience, ou don't need to have specified an autosave location. You can in future though, which makes these files so much easier to find.)

Good luck and I hope that helps.

My God you're like Batman.

Thank you so much!

What an irritating experience. I opened a new excel file, saved it without noticing the new file was saved into Office 2011 Autorecovery. Then I couldn't get to it.

Thanks so much for posting this. You saved me so much aggrivation. I should have come here sooner!

Thanks again!

Thank you so much, I almost had a heart attack as I thaught I have lost 13 hours of research.

I was very excited when I read this because I have just lost three very valuable hours of dissertation work (which is due very soon FFS) but since I've got Word 2008 I think that the solution has to be elsewhere as I could not find the folder of Autorecovery in Office folder.

Thanks everyone for the help!

Open Word 2008 Preferences, look in Word > Preferences > File Locations > AutoRecover files:

See what location is set.

Guys, I have found the solution and it has saved my life. Let me note first that in my case, I had accidentally closed the Autorecovery file that Word automatically opened when it rebooted. I could not find the files in the Microsofy Autorecovery folder. However, I found a way that allowed me to recover all of it!

Basically, click "go" on the finder or press command+shift+G.

Then type this to access temporary documents: /private/var/folders

NB: do not erase anything from this point!!!

There are many many folders... Some of them have restricted access. It will take a while until you find one that may se suspicious to be the one! In my case, after going to the direction cited above, I then opened "kf" and then a long named folder like "hss24n112....", then a folder "T" and then "temporaryitems" and from there I saw many "Word Work Files" some of them ending in .doc but mainly in .tmp

Copy those into whatever folder you want to put them (or drag them) but do not erase anything!

Then simply drag any of those documents into word and hopefully you will find the mother**** document that scared the **** out of you. time for a little celebration and them back to work, knowing you have beat the system and that you are actually a hacker. Anyways, hope you find this useful!

Yes, I did that and then found it... But still, i could not find the latest version of the document because upon rebooting, I accidentally closed the recovered file without saving , which meant that a copy was only accessible from those hidden folders

Somehow I don't have Office 2011 AutoRecovery file within my Microsoft office file. I've tired to search it in the spotlight but without result.

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VERY IMPORTANT! MIGHT HELP!

Nothing worked for me accept the following:

Open Finder -> Harddisk -> Users -> Select the Admin User Box, Most cases its in your Name eg. John -> Library -> Application Support -> Microsoft -> Office -> Office 2011 AutoRecovery

***INCASE ANY OF THE FOLDERS DO NOT SHOW THEN ENABLE SHOW HIDDEN FILES BY DOING THE FOLLOWING:

So, prior to my upgrade to OS X 10.7 all of my OS related hacks where done using third party tools such as Secrets Prefpane. However, I have decided to try and avoid third party apps as much as possible, and actually try and keep my Lion install as slim as possible. Although this article was originally written for OS X Lion, the command has been tested and proved to work in Mountain Lion and Mavericks as well

So here’s my first of what will soon be many OS X terminal commands to do what the third party apps do, without the bloat/overhead.

To enable hidden files/folders in finder windows:

1. 1. Open Finder
2. 2. Open the Utilities folder
3. 3. Open a terminal window
4. 4. Copy and paste the following line in:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

1. 5. Press return
2. 6. Now hold ‘alt’ on the keyboard and right click on the Finder icon
3. 7. Click on Relaunch

You should find you will now be able to see any hidden files or folders. One you are done, perform the steps above however, replace the terminal command in step 4 with:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles NO

If the above is not working for you, you may want to try switching YES/NO to TRUE/FALSE .. Beware that this is case sensitive!

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

INCASE FOLDERS ARE NOT OPENING:

Switch folder view options from tiles to grid view.

HOPE THIS HELPS

LIST OF ALL THE PROBLEMS I FACED

MIGHT SAVE YOUR LIFE

THANK YOU;)

I have a better solution.

Quit using Microsoft programs.

You saved my day, too. Thank you sooooo much. I lost 2 hours of notes during an important conf call until I found your post. Hopefully Apple will work on a better version of Pages that will prevent us from using Microsoft tools in the future...

Greetings,

THANK YOU!!!!!! Perfect explanation and recovery of entire worksheet happened. SO grateful!

Hi future poster! Great that you recovered your data! It is nice to wanting to thank the original poster(s). However, most people in this thread get notifications about a new contribution in case that there is a new message. A thank you message isn't really a new contribution... Hence, my suggestion to you is to instead of posting a "thank you" message to like/thumb up the post.