How do I recover an unsaved Word document on Mac?

 

How to recover a Word Document on Mac?

Have you unintentionally shut down Microsoft Word without saving any of your documents or accidentally clicked on “don’t save word” on Mac? 

Are you searching the internet for ways on how to recover unsaved Word documents on Mac?

As per the features enabled within Microsoft Word for Mac, you may be able to quickly recover any unsaved data. In today’s blog post, I will be sharing with you two methods to recover your word document on Mac. 

Stay here and keep on reading if you want to discover how.

How to Recover Unsaved Word Documents on Mac?

Word for Mac comes with an inbuilt feature known as the AutoRecovery alternative. The system in itself turns it on and the application will consequently save a duplicate of an open Word record at regular time intervals. If Word freezes while you are busy writing or editing details in some document and the computer crashes then using the AutoRecovery feature you can save your unsaved files.

Let us go through the steps on how you can do it

1. Open “Finder” on your Mac, then select “Go” and then select “Go to Folder”.
2. Type in: “~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery” and select "Go".
3. Open the AutoRecovery organizer and find all the files that start with the name “AutoRecovery save of.” 
4. Select the one you need to recover and rename it by changing its file extension to “.doc”.
5. Double-tap on the lost file and it will then open in Word for Mac.
6. Finally click on File>Save As and type in another name for the document in the Name field, select a destination for it, and then click on the “Save” button.

That’s it! You have successfully recovered your Word document.

How to recover Word document from the TMP folder? 

Assuming that you are unable to retrieve unsaved word documents through AutoSave then it would be a wise choice to check your Temporary files. This feature saves a duplicate of the unsaved archive named Word Work File in the Temporary folder. 

Here is the detailed manual for figuring out how to recover unsaved word files from the TMP folder:

1. Select Finder>Applications>Utilities and then double-click on “Terminal.”
2. Inside the Terminal open $TMPDIR and you will be directed to the TMP folder, which stores the unsaved files.
3. Navigate to the document with the name “TemporaryItems.”
4. Right-click on the unsaved word files and click on “Open with…”> Microsoft word.
5. Finally, save the word document by selecting File>Save as and save it on to another location.

Conclusion

In this guide, we talked about two ways on how you can recover any unsaved Word document on Mac. You are now in a position to retrieve your lost files if any kind of unenforceable event occurs.

We hope that this guide has been informative and helpful to you in solving your issue. If you have any questions or queries feel free to ask in the comment section.