Word file empty

Hello again Jaeric,

If you have Time Machine, especially if you have Snapshots turned on, you may be able to find a copy with content in it. You might be able to use one of those file recovery tools. It would be a tedious search though.

We don't know what you did, so we don't know how to prevent it. How did you re-open the file? Could there be two files? One on, say, the desktop, and the other in documents? Did you try "open recent" to open the one that Word saved to?

Hello Jaeric,

It sounds like you had multiple files open. Some of them had content and some of them were blank. When you went to close them, you would have been asked for a file name. If you provided the same file name for all of them, one of the empty files could have overwritten the good files.

Hello again Jaeric,

It is something I encountered when I taught an introductory university computer science class years ago. The students would have lots of windows open, type their assignments, save, and close. But there would still be a window open, so they would save (with the same file name) and close. Repeat for all open windows. Homework is gone. This was in Windows. I remember thinking that this probably wouldn't have been possible on a Mac, but I don't remember why I thought that. Maybe it is possible.

I remember that some versions of Word did have saving bugs that would explain what you encountered. That was a few years ago though. The details are fuzzy. This was exactly the problem that Apple tries to solve with Autosave introduced in OS X 10.7 "Lion". If you use an Apple app like TextEdit or Pages, you don't ever need to save. There are some other complications though. Word is supposed to have its own autosave logic, but it is that logic that was involved with the saving bug I just mentioned. I think you might have encountered that.

Unless there are specific application reasons to the contrary, keep your OS X releases and those of Office 2016 for Mac current. OS X is at 10.11.3, and as of January 12, MS Word was at version 15.18.0. Based on your posted data, you are several months behind in updates for OS X and Word. That could be the determinant for unexpected application behavior.

Hello again Jaeric,

I don't understand about "working outside". You should always keep Time Machine turned on. You should also use Time Machine's local snapshots feature. It is turned on by default on a MacBook Pro. It essentially runs Time Machine and saves backups to your hard disk. It is designed explicitly for situations like this.

Hello,

You can if you use Time Machine - and had the Time Machine drive connected while working on the doc - you can find it in there.