How to restore a Word document if you haven’t saved it. Recovering an unsaved document in Word Recovering a closed Word document

Have you ever encountered a situation where a .doc or .docx file could not be opened due to an error? Or completely lose a document on which a lot of hard and painstaking work has been done? Probably, most PC users have encountered such a situation, and if not, then an article on this topic will still be interesting for them, since you need to be prepared for anything.

So, let's look at several ways to recover a lost or damaged file. Microsoft Word.

How to recover text from a damaged Word document

If the document is damaged, the user may encounter the following error:

If you have checked and ensured that you have permission to access the document and the disk, and are sure that there is enough space and memory on the disk, then the next step is to use the built-in recovery function in Word to get the text of the document back.

For this:

Open Word and select the File / Open / Browse tab

Find the file you want to open and select Recover text from any file from the pop-up menu. Click Open.

Sometimes, despite the recovery process, the file may remain damaged even if the file is successfully restored and opened. Formatting will be lost.

Another way to recover

If the above method does not work, Microsoft has provided another way to recover the Word file. To do this, go to the File / Open tab.

In the window that opens, select your document.

Click the Open button and select the “Open and Repair” option.

If you see the message when opening a document, you should install latest version programs.

Restore a backup copy of your Word document

If it is not possible to even find the file, you can try to detect a backup copy of the file created by Microsoft Word. This can be done as follows.

Select File/Open/Browse.

Go to the folder where the lost file was located. In the file type selection window, select “All files (*.*).” Usually the backup file is called “Backup…” + file name. Select and open such a file.

If it was not possible to detect a backup copy of the file in this way, then enter *.wbk (backup file format - Word Backup files) in the Windows search box. But in this case, the names of the backup files will not necessarily match the name of the lost file. Try opening *.wbk files one by one until you find the one you need.

Find and restore an autosaved copy of a file

If your computer is not configured to back up Microsoft Word document files, try restoring the document from AutoSave files.

Autosave files can be checked in the following folder:

C:\Users\ Name User \AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word

The name of the autocopy file will begin with “Autocopy...” and will be in *.asd format. Just click on the autocopy of the file and it will open as a Microsoft Word document.

Programs for recovering Microsoft Office documents

If none of the proposed functions bring the desired result, then try to recover the lost file using any of the programs in the package Microsoft Office You can use one of the many programs for recovering deleted documents.

Fortunately, the choice today is huge. The only advice is to choose a simpler program that specializes in recovering files in the Microsoft Office package format. Since different algorithms are often used to recover image files and documents, and accordingly, the quality of recovery can vary significantly.

As an example we can consider Hetman Office Recovery. Already from the name you can understand that the program specializes in recovering Microsoft Office format files. To recover your Word file, simply download and run the program, and use it to scan the disk on which the document was lost.

As a result of scanning, the program will display the found documents with original names. You can view their contents in the preview window. To restore the desired file, just mark it with a checkmark and click the “Next” button.

Have a great day!

Very actual question many users - how to recover a damaged Word document, or how to recover a lost document. I think everyone has had such a problem as losing a document. For example, you were typing something important in the program, a crash occurred, Microsoft Word crashed (closed), and after opening you find nothing, or the document does not open at all. To prevent this from happening in the future, I have prepared an article where I will show what you can use to restore a damaged version of a document.

How to recover a damaged Word document?

Let's say you tried to run a document file and saw the following error message.

This error already contains several recommendations from which you can understand what to do, for example, make sure that there is enough disk space, whether you have permission to use the document and edit it.

In this case, we can return the document using Word itself. Just open the icon of this program so that Word starts, and then go to the item on the left "Open" and select "Review".

In the explorer that opens, look for the document you want to open, click on it once so that its name appears in the field "File name". Next, you select the item from the drop-down menu "Recover text from any file" and click “Open”.

If the document is very large and you have used many design styles, it is not always successfully restored. Sometimes part of the text disappears, or there is text, but without formatting styles. The main thing, of course, is to restore the integrity of the document.

How to recover a Word document [Second method]

From what has been said above, it is clear that the first method does not always help, although it is worth using it. Let's move on to the next method.

Open Microsoft Word again and go to the File menu, then “Open” and the button "Review". Find the damaged document and click on it. Then click on the arrow where the “Open” button is and select the option there "Open and restore".

How to restore a Word backup?

Sometimes a file may get lost and you cannot find it anywhere. In this case, the program usually creates backups document, to open it you need to do the following:

Open Word and go to the “Open” section, then click on “Browse”. Remember where you saved the document and go to that folder. In the pop-up tab, select "All files", look for the lost document. Focus on the name and date. Sometimes such a document may be called “Backup copy...”.

If you fail, you can go another way. Open the search field in Windows and enter the extension of the Word backup file - *.wbk. It is more likely that such a file will be opened, but the point is that there may be more than one and the names may not match, so you will have to open and look at each one.

Autosave in Word, or how to restore a saved copy of a document

Typically, the program automatically creates backup copies of the document after a certain period of time. They are usually found along the following path: C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word.

Autosaved document names can begin with the word "Autocopy...", and the format of such files will be *.asd. To open such a file, you need to double-click on it.

Bonus option – Word file recovery program

I myself have never been interested in third-party Word recovery programs, but they can help if none of the above methods worked. As an example, I can cite the Hetman Office Recovery program. The utility, unfortunately, is paid; perhaps there are analogues, which I will include in this article. To use Hetman Office Recovery, just install it on your computer and check the disk for lost and damaged documents.

The program will find documents and show them in its window with real names. If you want to restore something, you select them with ticks, then it’s a matter of little things.

A very pressing question for many users is how to recover a damaged Word document, or how. I think everyone has had such a problem as losing a document. For example, you were typing something important in the program, a crash occurred, Microsoft Word crashed (closed), and after opening you find nothing, or the document does not open at all. To prevent this from happening in the future, I have prepared an article where I will show what you can use to restore a damaged version of a document.

How to recover a damaged Word document?

Let's say you tried to run a document file and saw the following error message.

In this case, we can return the document using Word itself. Just open the icon of this program so that Word starts, and then go to the item on the left "Open" and select "Review".

How to recover a Word document [Second method]

From what has been said above, it is clear that the first method does not always help, although it is worth using it. Let's move on to the next method.

How to restore a Word backup?

Sometimes a file may get lost and you cannot find it anywhere. In this case, the program usually creates backup copies of the document; to open it, you need to proceed as follows:

Autosave in Word, or how to restore a saved copy of a document

Autosaved document names can begin with the word "Autocopy...", and the format of such files will be *.asd. To open such a file, you need to double-click on it.

Bonus option – Word file recovery program

The program will find documents and show them in its window with real names. If you want to restore something, you select them with ticks, then it’s a matter of little things.

Good day.

I think that many who often work with documents in Microsoft Word have encountered a rather unpleasant situation: they typed and typed text, edited it, and then suddenly the computer rebooted (the power went out, an error occurred, or Word simply closed, reporting some kind of error). internal failure). What to do?

Actually, the same thing happened to me - the electricity was turned off for a couple of minutes when I was preparing one of the articles for publication on this site (that’s how the topic for this article was born). So, let's look at a few simple ways recover unsaved Word documents.

Article text that may have been lost due to a power failure.

Method #1: Automatic recovery in Word

No matter what happens: just a mistake, the computer suddenly rebooted (without even asking you about it), a failure at the substation and the power went out to the whole house - the main thing is not to panic!

Default, Microsoft program Word is quite “smart” and will automatically (in the event of an emergency shutdown, i.e. shutdown without the user’s consent) try to restore the document.

In my case, Microsift Word, after “abruptly” turning off the PC and turning it back on (after about 10 minutes), after starting it offered to save the unsaved docx documents. The picture below shows how it looks in Word 2010 (in other versions of Word the picture will be similar).

Important! Word only offers to restore files the first time you restart after a crash. Those. if you opened Word, closed it, and then decide to open it again, it will no longer offer you anything else. Therefore, I recommend that when you first start, you save everything that is required for further work.

Method 2: via auto-save folder

A little higher in the article I said that the Word program by default is quite smart (emphasized on purpose). The program, if you have not changed the settings, Automatically saves a document every 10 minutes to a “backup” folder (in case of unforeseen situations). It is logical that the second thing to do is to check if there is a missing document in this folder.

How to find this folder? I will give an example in Word program 2010.

Click on the “file/options” menu (see screenshot below).

Automatic document saving every 10 minutes. (you can change it, for example, to 5 minutes if your electricity often goes out);

Data directory for auto-saving (that’s what we need).

Simply select and copy the address, then open File Explorer and paste the copied data into its address bar. In the catalog that opens, you might be able to find something...

Method No. 3: Recovering a deleted Word document from disk

This method will help in the most severe cases: for example, there was a file on the disk, but now it is not there. This can happen for many reasons: viruses, accidental deletion (especially since Windows 8, for example, does not ask if you really want to delete the file if you click the Delete button), disk formatting, etc.

There are a huge number of programs for file recovery, some of which I have already published in one of the articles:

In this article, I would like to dwell on one of the best (and at the same time simple for novice users) programs.

Wondershare Data Recovery

The program supports the Russian language, works very quickly, and helps restore files in the most severe cases. By the way, the entire recovery process takes only 3 steps, more about them below.

What not to do before recovery:

Do not copy any files to the disk (on which the documents/files are missing), and do not work with it at all;

Do not format the disk (even if it appears as RAW and Windows prompts you to format it);

Do not restore files to this disk (this recommendation will come in handy later. Many people restore files to the same disk that they scan: You can’t do that! The fact is that when you restore a file to the same disk, it can overwrite files that have not yet been restored).

Step 1.

After installing the program and launching it: it offers us several options to choose from. Select the very first one: “file recovery”. See picture below.

Step 2.

In this step, we are asked to indicate the disk where the missing files were located. Usually the documents are located on the C drive (unless, of course, you transferred them to the D drive). In general, you can scan both disks one by one, especially since scanning is fast, for example, my 100 GB disk was scanned in 5-10 minutes.

By the way, it is advisable to check the box “ on deep scanning"- the scanning time will increase greatly, but you will be able to recover more files.

Step 3.

After scanning (by the way, during it it is better not to touch the PC at all and close all other programs), the program will show us all types of files that can be recovered.

And she supports them, I must say, in large numbers:

Archives (rar, zip, 7Z, etc.);

Video (avi, mpeg, etc.);

Documents (txt, docx, log, etc.);

Pictures, photos (jpg, png, bmp, gif, etc.), etc.

Actually, all that remains is to select which files to restore, click the appropriate button, specify a drive other than scanning and restore the files. This happens quite quickly.

By the way, after recovery, some files may become unreadable (or not completely readable). The Date Recovery program itself warns us about this: files are marked with circles of different colors (green - the file can be recovered in good quality, red - “there are chances, but few”...).

That's all for today, good luck with Word everyone!

Due to the widespread use of Microsoft Office, we are accustomed to storing personal information, business data or educational materials in Word documents, Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint presentations. It is convenient to view such files from hard drive computer, external hard disk, USB flash drives or any other storage medium. However, if you do not take care of the safety of these documents, then storing information in them can be risky.

After all, accidental operations (such as deleting or formatting), viruses, software failure or hardware may lead to loss of the document. Often the data stored in lost documents is very important. This is why many users are interested in the question: “ How to recover a Word document?“.

In this article we will look at several options for restoring a Word document: both using the functions built into Microsoft Word and using third party programs for data recovery.

A little about Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is probably the most popular program in the Microsoft Office suite, rivaled only by Microsoft Excel.

Just imagine, today a huge number of versions of Word for Windows have already been released: Microsoft Word 97, 2000, XP, 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013 and finally Microsoft Word 2016. It’s hard to even remember which other program has such a long service life. and a successful history.

The most popular among other versions were Word 2007 and Word 2010. But with the release of the latest, increasingly popular version of Word 2016, users increasingly have questions about how to restore a Word 2016 document. It is this version of the program that we will talk about.

Autosave

Have you ever been in a situation where you accidentally closed a document you've been working on for a long time without saving it? Or when the power went out while working on a document or the computer turned off for some other reason?

For most users, this situation leads to panic. But fortunately, Word 2016 has a built-in document autosave feature that makes it easy to restore the last autosaved version of a file. In Microsoft Office, this feature is activated by default with an autosave time of 10 minutes, but this can be changed if desired.

For settings this parameter go to menu File > Options > Preservation.

This feature means that Word will automatically save the document after a specified period of time. And when the user accidentally closes a document without saving it, it will be possible to restore the last automatically saved version of the file available in the specified autorecovery directory (which can also be configured).

How AutoSave a Word Document Works

The timer is activated after any change is made to the document, as well as after automatic or manual saving. After the set time has elapsed, it will be saved. a new version file.

If you save the file by clicking the button Save(Shift+F12) or using the menu File > Save, the autosave timer will stop until the next changes are made to the file.

Canceling a previous operation

When editing or making changes to Word documents, some users prefer to use a combination Ctrl+Z or the undo arrow to cancel the previous operation. This is a very convenient way to return a document to its previous state. But this method has a limited number of undo operations. Therefore, restoring the last saved version of the file will be the preferred recovery method.

How to recover a resaved document

Click menu File in the upper left corner, a window will open as in the previous image. Look in the section Document Management, where all automatically saved versions of files are listed, sorted by saving time.

Just click on the required version, and it will open in a new window in which you can select Comparison Restore.

Of course, you can find automatically saved versions of the file on your computer in the previously mentioned autorecovery directory and, by double-clicking on the desired version of the file, repeat the procedure specified in the previous paragraph.

How to recover an unsaved Word document

It's worse if you close a document without saving, in which many changes have been made, in addition to previous automatically saved versions on the tab File are not displayed. In this case, the only option to find the latest automatically saved version of the file is to look in the folder on your computer where automatic saving of files is configured.

If you don’t remember which folder you configured to automatically save Word files, you can see the path to this directory in Word settings: File > Options > Preservation > Data directory for autorecovery. The autosaved version file has the format .asd.

After required file will be found, just double click on it and open it using Word. The file will open in a new window in which you can select Comparison(With current version file) or Restore.

How to recover a deleted Word document

The document recovery methods described above are very convenient for Word users. But they will not work if the automatically saved document file is lost as a result of a virus attack, disk formatting or accidental deletion, or for any other similar reason. And if the automatically saved file is missing, and the Word document is lost - what to do in this situation?

You can use one of the programs to recover Microsoft Office files. For example, Hetman Office Recovery.

After downloading and installing Hetman Office Recovery, run the program and you will be prompted to select the drive from which you want to recover the file.

Double-click on the disk from which you want to recover the file and follow the next steps of the recovery wizard:

Select the required analysis type: Quick Scan or Full Analysis;
Specify the criteria for searching files: file type, size and creation date (if necessary);
Click Further.

After this, the program will scan your storage media and show deleted files, which you can view using a preview and save the recovered files in a convenient way for you.

Now you know how to recover a Word document: unsaved or accidentally closed, accidentally deleted or lost as a result of a computer failure. The situation of losing Word documents should no longer be a problem for you.