Tips

Recover files from Word using AutoRecover files

Posted on by ls-team
Save early. Save often. If you don’t follow that motto, then sometimes you can lose data in a word document. Power outages and patch reboots are usually to blame. We tell our users to close all documents before leaving at night, but that never seems to happen… Word automatically saves a file every few minutes. It DOES NOT overwrite the original or save the original document. Below is the process to recover these files.

Find the location for the AutoRecovery files

  1. On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the File Locations tab.  
  2. Click the Microsoft Office Button (Word 2007), and then click Word Options.
  3. In the left pane, click Save.
  4. In the right pane, take note ot the AutoRecover file location.
  5. You will probably want to select the text in the text box, right-click and select copy.

Rename the file

  1. Browse to the AutoRecover file location.
  2. On Windows XP, click start, run and paste the AutoRecover file location in the box and click OK.
  3. On Windows Vista or 7, click the Start button and paste the AutoRecover location and hit enter
  4. You’ll see a list of files named similar to AutoRecovery save of Document1.asd.
  5. Because you need to change the extension of the file, we need to confirm file extension are shown.
    1. On Windows 7 and Vista, select Organize, Folder and Search Options.
    2. Select the View tab, then uncheck the Hide Extensions for known file types check box.
    3. Click ok to return to the file list.
  6. Right-click the file you want to recover, select rename and change the extension (asd) to wbk.

Open the file with Word

  1. Double-click the file to open with Word and then IMMEDIATELY SAVE THE FILE SOMEWHERE ELSE.
These steps will allow you to recove lost work from a document that was closed improperly.
ls-team