Word closed unexpectedly while I was working on a document and now I can’t find the latest version. I reopened the app, but no recovery option appeared. Is there somewhere on my Mac I can check for an autosaved copy? I’d really like to avoid redoing all the work.
Yep, check before you redo anything. You can often recover an unsaved Word document even when no recovery window shows up, as long as AutoRecovery got a chance to save something before the crash. By default it saves every 10 minutes, so it’s no guarantee your very latest changes made it in. Word doesn’t really point you to it though, took me a while to find recovered documents in Word for Mac the first time too. It’s a hidden folder, this is what I’d do:
-
In Finder press Shift+Cmd+G and paste ~/Library/Containers/com.Microsoft.Word/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery
-
Copy anything that looks recent to your Desktop and open the copy, not the original
-
If it has your missing text, save it under a new name right away
That’s the path Microsoft gives in its recovery steps. And don’t save over the version you’ve got now until you’ve checked, otherwise you lose the thing you’d compare against.
Okay, found the folder. There are a few files in there but none of them has my document’s name, so I’m not sure which one I’m looking for. How do I tell which one’s mine? Also, could the newer version have just been deleted when Word closed? Not sure if I should be checking the Trash too.
Totally normal tbh, recovery files don’t always have the doc’s name. Switch Finder to list view and sort by Date Modified, anything from around the time Word closed is the one to try first. Same as before, open copies, not the files themselves.
And nah, a crash won’t delete the file itself, so no need to dig through the Trash. That’s where deleted Word documents end up when you bin them yourself, and Time Machine is how you’d retrieve a deleted Word document on Mac after that. What you lost is just the changes since your last save, and that’s exactly what AutoRecovery is for. If that folder ever looks empty, Word > Settings (or Preferences) > File Locations shows where your version keeps AutoRecover files. Without AutoRecovery or a backup, there probably isn’t another copy of those changes anywhere, Word’s own version history only covers files in OneDrive or SharePoint.
It’s saved locally, not in OneDrive. Two of the files have today’s date, so I copied those to the Desktop. One opens fine and it’s definitely my doc, has most of what I wrote before the crash 
Already saved it under a new name. The other one won’t open though, Word says there’s a problem with it. Worth trying that one too, in case it has the last bit?
For the broken one, go to File > Open in Word, pick the file and choose Recover Text from the menu at the bottom right, that pulls out whatever text it can from a damaged file. You might have to turn on Confirm file format conversion at Open in Word’s General settings first for that option to show up. It can’t bring back changes that were never saved anywhere though, it only gets out what’s actually in the file.
Also good to know for later: if Word asks you to save and you click Don’t Save, it deletes the AutoRecovery file too. So a Word document that was not saved on purpose like that is basically gone, while a crash like yours is actually the case where something can still be left behind.
Nice, glad most of it survived. For next time, set auto recovery in Word to save more often: Word > Settings > Save (Preferences on older versions), and drop it from 10 minutes to 5 or so 
It doesn’t replace Cmd+S, but it would’ve caught more of those last paragraphs.
Also worth setting up Time Machine if you haven’t. It keeps older saved versions of your files, so it’s the easiest way to recover a lost Word document when Word itself has nothing. It only has what was actually saved when the backup ran though, so Cmd+S still matters.
Recover Text only pulled a messy chunk out of the broken one, nothing new, so the first file it is. Lost the last few paragraphs, but that beats redoing the whole thing 
Didn’t even know that folder existed. Honestly thought there was no way to recover a Word document on Mac without that recovery window, so thanks all.