How to find a lost file in Microsoft Office Autorecovery

Hi Folks,

I had this issue last night and I could find your path - I was stuck after 'Go'! Could not find 'Library' anywhere.

Called the lovely Apple Support Folk and the extra little trick is to search for the folder instead via Spotlight. Although a normal search won't bring it up, therefore try:

1. Hit Command + Space bar,
2. Type: ~/Library,
3. Hit Return

Then follow the prompts:

Application Support

Microsoft

Office

Office 2011 AutoRecovery

Happy Searching! :-)

I lost an Excel file I have been working on and using for years. I had just spent a few hours making some improvements to it that I was excited about and decided to email it to myself as a backup measure. Ironically, saving and closing caused me to lose track of it - it was like it disappeared and my computer was pretending like it never happened. I cried... seriously. Then I googled "lost excel file" and this was the second URL google returned. THANK YOU!!!!

Thank you very much for this.

I had the problem of a missing file as described above. Was very important that I found it! The above steps fixed my problem, after I had been searching frantically all morning!

Thanks a million - just want to add - I could not find the Office and Office 2011 AutoRecovery folders (even with hidden folder 'shown' until I used terminal to cd into them - just an FYI for anyone else looking - again Thanks

Hello, margb, I cannot thank you enough for this post. I was freaking out before, because I thought I had permanently lost a graduate school assignment after my computer crashed. I tried searching for possible solutions and nearly bought a data recovery application for $90, because I was that desperate. Thank goodness I found this, because I have managed to recover my file that I thought was gone for sure (I was even considering taking a day off work to start my assignment over again). Thank you so much again!

Thank you!! What a lifesaver this was!! I see this post was written over 5 years ago, so I hope you will still see this, but this helped me find something that was a complete and total mystery of how it got lost. I would have never found it tucked away in this hidden recovery file!! Again, thank you!!

you saved my life. thank you.

Just an FYI, the library (in this case the user library) is hidden by default in Lion and Mountain Lion, you accessed it correctly but that is the reason the files did not appear when you searched for them. The location of the autorecover files is changeable, if you want to make them more accessible you could locate them elsewhere.

Hold that thought ...

I just verified the location of the files (Outlook 2011) and the option to relocate is not available (Windows only) so stick with your existing method, my apologies.

This also saved me from writing an entire term paper over. I knew it was there somewhere.... I just needed help finding it! Thank you so much!!!

I kept getting this error message when I was working in Word 2011 and searching for answers:

"This is not a valid file name. Try one or more of the following: Check the path to make sure it was typed correctly. Select a firle from the list of files and folders."

It started about 3 weeks ago. I was driving me bonkers. I found this posting that let me find the hieracy for the AutoRecovery files and reloacted them to Office 2011 >Office folder. I don't know how it got moved to another location (actually the file was in the trash when I found it. When I went to (Word>Preference>File Location>AutoRecovery) it showed the location of the file as being in the trash - Weird. I moved the file to Office and clicked Modify and the AutoRecovery link in Location showed the change that the file was now in Office. It seems that all is well again-at least for now.

According to some sources I found, I thought I was going to have to reload Word 2011. I did not have to go through that hassel. Thanks so much for the response given by margb that helped me solve this annoying issue.

Gwen

Gwen Kelley wrote:

I kept getting this error message when I was working in Word 2011 and searching for answers:

"This is not a valid file name. Try one or more of the following: Check the path to make sure it was typed correctly. Select a firle from the list of files and folders."

It started about 3 weeks ago. I was driving me bonkers. I found this posting that let me find the hieracy for the AutoRecovery files and reloacted them to Office 2011 >Office folder.

Link to the posting please.

I made an account on these forums just to thank you. I was having a panic attack. Whomever was responsible for the decision to so carefully hide the recovery file deserves a good smack upside the head.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.