Word 2011 for Mac Did Not Save My Work despite many save presses. Why?

I have been working on a document all week on word 2011 for Mac.

I initially saved the document and named it. It is still there in the directory folder I originally created it in.

I pressed the save icon every 20 minutes when working on my word document, saved it before bed, saved it when I woke up etc. Hundreds of save presses in over 100 hours of work in the past 10 days.

I also had auto recovery saving enabled to save every 10 minutes, this is still enabled.

Additionally I have time machine set up where it had been backing my whole drive after every few hours to a time capsule. I thought I had my backup protocols covered!

Today while editing and moving a text box within the word document, the whole word doc crashed with an error message saying “that it had encountered a problem and needed to close”.

I was expecting a recovered document to open back up as has occurred many times in the past when Word automatically reboots after a crash. However when the recovered document opened every piece of work had vanished except for the title page and a few words.

I thought no sweat I will go back and get a time machine copy as I had a weeks worth of back ups.

Upon going back to every back up from the last week, all my back up copy versions of the document in time machine is just the title page as well, even though I had been saving this all week and the documents was 50 pages long.

It appears that despite me hitting save, the document has not saved any of my work all week except for the first time I created the file; is this possible?

I cannot find a copy of the document in the Microsoft auto recovery, it does not reappear in it original form when I reopen Word.

I cannot find another copy in trash or on time capsule/time machine in the completed format that I had been saving it in.

I can find the file with the original file name, where I originally saved it but all the work has vanished even though the crash occurred when I was simply moving a text box to sit under a table. (IE I did not delete everything and then press save.

Things I noticed into the lead up the crash:

I tried to email to another email account last night as an attachment from word as a third back up and it would not send as an attachment, where this is usually an easy way to send a document as a safety back up.

I tried to “save as” and give it another name before the crash to experiment with different formatting and called it test test test test but it did not show up in the folder when I hit the “save as” button. Any subsequent search with SPOTLIGHT does not show any file by this name test test test test, even though I am 120% positive that I did save the file correctly in two different places on my computer. Hence again the file would not save even though I did all the normal steps of saving.

Why was the file not saving when I have been pushing the SAVE button? Was the file corrupted?

What has gone wrong and does anyone know where to look for the missing work? I have exhausted every option I know over the last few hours. Thanks for considering!

A very dejected Digger Boyle.

These links take you to MAC Forum where others appear to have had this problem but can’t find a solution to my issue.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3856366?answerId=20358862022#20358862022

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3676037?start=0&tstart=0