Recovering unsaved word doc on OSX

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

Ok so this may not work for most people, but this is my set up,

The Autosave files go to my desktop, I closed the document which was just called Document 1, so the file on the desktop was called Autosave Document 1 (or similar)

My Mac is set to backup any files from my desktop to the cloud, I don't save much on there for long, only things I am working on which I may want to view when on the go, but having the backup feature meant that the Autosave file whilst I had been working on my document had been automatically saving to the iCloud (and updating every so often as I typed more and more)

then once I closed the document (and clicked No to "do you want to save" which I instantly regretted as I am sure many of you did if you are on this thread) The file on the desktop also disappeared. I remembered I had access to these files on my phone but didn't click it to aeroplane mode first which I wish I had tried, as It also synced instantly with my desktop which now had the autosave file removed so it appeared and disappeared just as quick...so close!

I then did some searching and found out that there is a recovered option on Icloud (its in settings then on the bottom left it says restore files) and there I had 30 days worth of Autosaves of Mircosoft Word files I have been using in the past month. This feature means I have a fail safe (as long as connected to the internet obviously) that will back up any of my word documents and allow me to restore them even days and weeks after losing them

Hope this works for somebody else,

Price you pay for not saving Office files on a regular basis. AFAIK, you can set an autosave interval:

If the document was not saved you can not "recover" it. It was not saved anywhere so it is no where to be recovered from.

Thanks for posting those links, Jim. The slideshare one helped me recover an autosave just now!