Three Methods to Recover Deleted/Lost or Unsaved Word Documents on Mac

If you delete a Word document by mistake or lose your Word document due to software crashed, Mac froze, you still can get the lost or unsaved Word document back. In this article, we will introduce three methods to help you securely and completely restore deleted, lost or unsaved Word documents on Mac.

• #1 Recover Unsaved Word documents from AutoRecovery folder on Mac.
• #2 Recover deleted/lost Word documents from Mac trash bin.
• #3 Recover deleted or lost Word documents with Mac data recovery software.

#1 Recover Unsaved Word documents from AutoRecovery folder on Mac.

Word for Mac has a built-in autosave feature called AutoRecover which is switched on by default. This means that Word is quietly saving the document you are working on without you needing to manually tell the software to do so. For this feature to function properly you'll need to initially save the document with a name, then Word will make incremental saves every 10 minutes.

If you lose your Word document due to software crashed, Mac froze or any other issue, you can recover your Word documents from AutoRecovery folder. First of all, you just need to find the AutoRecovery folder.

Open Finder, then click Go > Go To Folder (or press SHIFT + COMMAND + G) and enter the appropriate folder path from the table below. Replace with your username:

/Users//Library/Containers/com.Microsoft/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery

If you are using Office 2011 - The next time that you open an application, files in the AutoRecovery folder are listed in the Open Recent list. Or you can find them by going to Go > Go To Folder (or pressing SHIFT + COMMAND + G) and entering "/Users/username/Library/Application Support/ Microsoft/Office/Office 2011 AutoRecovery"

Open the AutoRecovery folder, locate all the files that start with the words "AutoRecovery save of". Select the one you want to recover, rename the file, then add the ".doc" filename extension.

Then open the file with Word for Mac, click the File menu and select "Save As"'. Type a new name for the file into the Name field, select a folder for the file and click the "Save" button.

#2 Recover deleted/lost Word documents from Mac trash bin.

If you can’t find your Word document on your Mac, the Word document may be moved to the trash. Just open trash, and then find the deleted Word document. Right-click on it and choose Put Back. If you don't see your file look for a 'Recovered Items' folder in the Trash. It's possible that your file is located in that.

#3 Recover deleted or lost Word documents with Mac data recovery software.

When your Word documents are deleted and you have emptied the trash bin, you can use Mac data recovery software to help you recover the lost Word documents. Do Your Data Recovery for Mac is a powerful Mac file recovery software. It can help you easily recover deleted or lost Word documents even the hard drive is erased. Download it here:

Do Your Data Recovery for Mac is pretty simple to use. Just download and install this software on your Mac, then follow the steps below to recover deleted or lost Word documents on Mac.

Step 1. Choose the Mac hard drive.

Run Do Your Data Recovery for Mac, it shows all hard drive and devices on your Mac. Just select the Mac hard drive to start Word document recovery.

Step 2. Scan the hard drive to find lost Word documents.

Just click on Scan button to find the deleted or lost Word documents.

Step 3. Preview and recover lost Word documents.

After scanning, you can preview the recoverable Word documents. Then select the wanted Word documents and save them.

If you can’t find the lost Word documents after quick scan, just try advanced recovery mode to find more lost Word documents. Do Your Data Recovery for Mac also can help you recover lost photos, Excels, PPTs, Videos, PDFs and other files from MAC hard drive, memory card, USB flash drive, external hard drive, digital camera, etc.

As you’ve seen, the deleted, lost or unsaved Word documents can be recovered by data recovery methods. If you are going to sell, donate your Mac and want to permanently erase your private Word documents, you have to use special data erasure tool to permanently destroy your Word documents. Here is a guide: permanently erase Word documents on Mac to avoid data recovery.