Have you ever lost your important Word file because you didn’t save it? If yes, then you must understand how difficult this situation is. Many of you must have experienced this terrible situation of losing a Word document.
Usually, such a situation arises when you accidentally close your Word file or if any sort of system crash occurs. Luckily, there are a few methods available that you can apply to recover unsaved or lost Word files (no matter the version) on Windows devices.
Here, we will discuss the best ways to recover unsaved or lost Word files on the Windows system.
What Causes Deletion of Word Files on Windows?
Before you proceed with the methods to recover your unsaved or lost Word files on Windows, it is important to find the exact cause behind the issue. Some common reasons for such issues are:
- Automatic deletion of Word documents from your hard disk.
- Word application may crash while you are working on the document.
- Any problem with your hard drive or storage device corrupts or deletes your files.
- Data loss may occur due to virus or malware attacks.
How do I Recover Unsaved or Lost Word Files on Windows?
In this section, we will discuss some easy and simple methods that you can try to get your unsaved Word files back. Just go through these data recovery methods one by one:
Method 01: Use AutoRecovery Feature to Recover Unsaved Word Files
Microsoft provides an in-built AutoRecovery feature that enables your system to recover your unsaved Word files. This Auto Recovery option is enabled by default when you install the application. It saves a copy of your Word documents after some specific time.
You can go through the following steps to enable the Auto Recovery option on your Word document:
- Open your Word document and go to File > Opitons > Save.
- If unchecked, tick the box next to the “Save AutoRecover information every * minute” and “Keep the last autosaved version if I close without saving”.
- At last, click the “OK” button to save the changes.
Once the option is enabled on your device, it will start automatically saving your Word file after the time interval you have selected. You can change the automatic save frequency using the same steps mentioned above.
Method 02: Use the Recover Unsaved Documents Feature in Word
You can use Microsoft’s Recover Unsaved Documents option to prevent your Word doc from being permanently deleted. Go through the following steps to access your unsaved Word file using this feature:
- Open Microsoft Word on your device and go to the File menu located on top of your window.
- Now, click the Manage Document button and then select Recover Unsaved Documents from the menu that appears. This will open a list of unsaved Word documents on your screen.
- Choose the unsaved Word file that you want to recover and then click the Open button.
- When your file opens in Word, save it either using the File menu or the Ctrl + S keys.
Method 03: Recover Unsaved Word Files via Windows Temporary Files
Windows keeps many temporary files on your device that you can directly access until they are saved there. This method best suits you when you don’t want to use the above recovery options and need to recover your unsaved Word files directly.
Follow the below-mentioned steps to recover unsaved or lost Word files on Windows using this option:
- Open your File Explorer and go to the path: C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles (Replace User with your local system username or press this string into the Run prompt).
- This will open the list of Word files automatically saved for you. Select all the files you need to restore.
- Right-click on the required files and select the Copy option from the context menu or use Ctrl + C shortcut.
- Now, go to the location where you want to save the file and right-click anywhere inside that folder. Select the Paste option or use the Ctrl + V shortcut.
- Wait till all the files get successfully completed. After that, your unsaved Word documents will be restored to that desired place.
Once done with the above steps, open that Word file and start working on them without any fear that it’ll be deleted.
Method 04: Recover Unsaved Word Documents Using Data Recovery Software
If the above-mentioned methods fail to recover your unsaved Word document, there is no need to worry. There are several data recovery software that you can use to recover your lost data, including your lost Word documents. In this section, we will use amazing data recovery software, i.e., Stellar Data Recovery Professional, which allows you to restore deleted documents in a few simple steps.
This tool can recover your deleted documents, photos, and other file types from any storage device, including HDD, SSD, etc. The Deep scan feature of the tool allows you to restore data from encrypted drives.
How to Recover Unsaved or Lost Word Files on Windows via Stellar Data Recovery Professional?
Now it’s time to learn the steps to know how you can get your unsaved Word documents back using this professional data recovery software:
- First, you need to download and install the Stellar Data Recovery Professional tool on your device. After installing the software, launch it and select what you need to recover. Click Next to continue.
- Now, select the location where the lost data is located and click the “Scan” button. This will start the scanning process to detect the target files.
- Once scanning gets completed, preview the recoverable items and click the “Recover” button to save them securely on your device.
How to Prevent Word Documents from Being Lost?
It is very frustrating to lose a Word file especially when you have spent hours working on it. While issues like data loss can occur to anyone without any warning. So, it is important to follow some practices that can help to prevent such data loss issues.
Check some of these tips and tricks below:
- Enable the Autorecover option as it is very useful in recovering your Word documents that are lost due to system crashes, user errors, and other reasons.
- It is important to have multiple backups of important Word files as these backups help you a lot to prevent complete data loss.
- Make sure your hard drive has enough storage capacity to save new files. System failure or malware attacks cause harm to your hard drive and lead to the deletion of data stored on it.
- Avoid downloading software programs from untrusted sources.
Wrapping Up
It is an easy and quick process to get your Word files back using the above-mentioned best ways. We’ve highlighted various methods that you can apply to recover unsaved Word documents.
We hope that this article helps you to get your lost Word documents back. If you ever face issues while applying the manual methods, try a professional data recovery software such as Stellar Data Recovery Professional.
It is the fastest and safest tool that can help you to get your deleted files in no time. It restores your important Word documents and then you can save them on your device.