Recovering unsaved word doc on OSX

Hello, i've the same problem and i could solved it following these stheps:

- Open the file with OpenOffice

- Save the file in a new format

- Download this tool and run it with the corrupt file

- Save the recovered file in a new word document

It works for me, so hopefully help.

Hello,

I have Microsoft word for 2016, any advice? I know the exact time that i lost the version of the doc i wanted and accidently erased everything. I just want to get back to a version 1-2 saves away. I was not working on any kind of online place. I'm completely offline on word so none of those options work. I'm desperate. Weeks of work.

Hope,

As user Adi Himpson said above, you may need to do this:

Just in case anyone finds their way here by Google, as I did looking for how to find the Office 2016 autosave files...

You can locate them by going clicking the Go menu in the Finder, choosing Go To Folder and pasting:

~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery/

in the box.

You may need to rename any files you find there as .doc instead of .docx if they won't open properly.

jcmckinn

You saved my life!!! The night before a huge final exam I lost my word document that I was studying from. Thanks a lot!!

I lost my Apple I.D and I just spent about 30 minutes looking for my I.D and password just to comment and thank you.

In my case, for Word 2016, version 15.22, was a combination of going with Terminal (open $TMPDIR) and looking in the 'com.microsoft.Word' directory. I sorted by Date Modified and got the data I was looking for

Thank you Adi ! I Couldn't open my autorecover file and I was having heart failure. I want to CELEBRATE YOUR WISDOM - who knew taking the x of .docx would be the solution to my problems. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU! 🙂

Wow, this just saved my day! Thanks a lot!!! the terminal thing with the "open $TMPDIR" worked, when nothing else did. however, after opening with "TextEdit" I further had to export from there to a PDF. because simply copy & pasting from TextEdit to Word created some problems (spaces/numbers between every character). With the PDF save that problem was gone.

Guys, I found the solution!!! For those of you whose file path isn't as cut an dry as the previous posts here, there's a way to find out what it is, and track your autorecovery, where ever the heck it lives.

First, go to ->Spotlight Search->Terminal-> in the terminal command window type find * -iname 'autorec*'

**DO NOT ALTER THIS COMMAND, COPY AND PASTE FROM HERE STARTING WITH find and ending with '**

This should then spit out the file path for our autorecovery, for example:

Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery

This is different for every computer, so yours maybe different than what I have listed up above.

Next, open Finder, click Go from the dropdown menus up top ->Go To Folder-> /users/"your user name"/from here copy and paste the file path that was given to you in Terminal. Again, mine was Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery. My entry into Go To Folder looked like this: /Users/"my username"/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRe covery

Voila! This should open your autorecovery folder. Hope this helps.

Can't thank you enough jcmckinn! Managed to recover a slightly earlier version using your suggestion, and formatting was all messed up, but small issues compared to re-writing the whole article from scratch... will still be haunted by the wheel of death for a while though!

2 days passed since I lost my unsaved document, therefore none of the above worked for me.

In the end, this is where I found my unsaved doc:

/Users/USERNAME/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Documents

(Replace USERNAME with your Mac Username.

Step-by-step guide 1:

1. Click on Finder;

2. Once a new Finder window Opens, click on "Go" on the top menu bar;

3. Click on Go To Folder

4. Type the following exactly, just replace USERNAME with your Mac Username:

/Users/USERNAME/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Documents

5. Your file should be here.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Alternatively, try:

1. Click on Finder;

2. Once a new Finder window Opens, click on "Go" on the top menu bar;

3. Click on Go To Folder

4. Type /Users/

5. Double click on your Username that you are logged in with;

6. Once you enter your User folder, Right Click on an empty space inside the folder and click on Show View Options;

7. Once a new menu appears, select "Show Library Folder" and close the menu.

8. A new Library folder should now appear in the User folder.

9. Enter the Library folder, then Containers, then com.microsoft.Word, then Data, then Documents;

10. Your file should be here.

Thank you so so so so SOOOO much for this!! I literally spent hours doing my assignments and it suddenly crashed on me and everything was gone. LITERALLY EVERYTHING. Thanks to you I managed to recover my work and not have to start over! Thank you!!!!🙂🙂😁😁

Thanks so much for the link to the Temporary files folders. It was extremely helpful right when I was about to give up hope. It wasn't easy, weeding through the raw content of the TextEdit file that I found, but at least I retrieved the information that I thought lost.

I just wanted to add that for me the word doc wasn't in the "Temporaryitems" folder but in the "com.microsoft.Word" folder, which I also found through "open $TMPDIR".

Hi,

I had similar problem on Word 15 on MacOS 10.11 El Capitan, maybe thsi will be helpfil to someone. I wrote quite a long doc and haven't saved it, then tried to email it, then the whole thing crashed.

After extensive search i fund my doc in the following folder:

macintosh HD / users / [user] /library/ containers / com.microsoft.word / data / documents

it sounds logic, doesn't it? :-P

happy hunting

M

Dear Jim,

Sorry to trouble you.

I can locate the .tmp files but I don't understand how I go from there to opening the word document.

Can you help - 6 hrs work down the drain otherwise.

Thanks so much.

Andrew

I'm having the same problems. To insure that I don't overwrite the files, can i use for example Data Rescue with another mac to scan and retrive from the mac where the files got deleted.

I didn't quite understand the explanation from the link "The Safe Mac" how this will work.

"Once you are safe from unintentional overwriting, you need to get some recovery software. Three options on the Mac are Data Rescue, File Salvage and Stellar Phoenix. All three can be ordered on physical media, in which case you’ll get a bootable emergency disk, or as download copies. Either way, you will need some other kind of media – a flash drive or hard drive, for example – on which to store the recovered word doc files. NEVER put recovered word doc files on the drive they’re being recovered from, even if the software lets you do that!"

The explanation above skips one part, or then im just really confused how the retreaving will happen.

In my case Its an old macbook air, and i lost the OS x instalation flash drive. so im completely at a loss