After a long process of editing a Word document on your Mac, it will be quite frustrating to leave it unsaved. When encountering this situation, take a deep breath and calm down first, don’t let the panic take your files away forever.
It is generally advised that you should use the AutoRecover feature in Word app to restore the unsaved Word documents, it works like life savior. But we are anticipating that some users don’t enable this feature or have tried AutoRecovery but failed. In these circumstances, we will look at some quick and easy ways to recover unsaved Word documents on Mac without AutoRecovery.
We will mainly focus on unsaved Word recovery in this guide, but if you want to restore a previous version of the Word file, or your files are just deleted/lost, the steps are also listed.
Cisdem Data Recovery for Mac
Free Download macOS 10.9 or later
Word crashed suddenly and the Word document was left unsaved on your Mac? Well, if you have enabled AutoSave feature in your Word app, once you realized the Word file is not saved, you can immediately open the Word file or relaunch the app to restore with this AutoSave tool.
If reopening or relaunching doesn’t work, there are 4 solutions for unsaved Word document recovery on Mac.
If you have enable AutoSave in Word for Mac, we can restore unsaved Word documents from auto recover location. AutoRecover is a feature of Microsoft Word series helping users to save the files automatically when working (editing or modifying) on a Word document. By default, Microsoft Word automatically saves the files every 10 minutes.
For Office Word 2016/2019/2021/Office 365
/Users
For Office Word 2011:
/Users
If you haven’t enabled AutoRecovery, or you want a recovery solution with higher recovery rate, you can use dedicated Mac Word data recovery software. To make things easier, here we will recommend you the best Word document recovery tool for Mac – Cisdem Data Recovery.
Cisdem Data Recovery for Mac is designed to safely get all your deleted, lost, formatted even unsaved Word documents back from your Mac hard drive, and other storage devices, and it does more:
Free Download macOS 10.9 or later 
tips: If you cannot preview a file, the file may be damaged, Cisdem will auto repair it and allows you to save the repaired
If you haven’t enabled AutoRecover, or you have tried AutoRecover but it didn’t work, you can launch Terminal on Mac to restore unsaved Word document on Mac after crash, from the Temporary Folder.
You may have logged in Microsoft Word app with your OneDrive account, this also creates a backup of the file in the cloud. In the case that you left a Word document unsaved and could not find on your Mac, you can check if there is a backup in OneDrive.
It’s possible for Mac to move the temporary files to Trash bin after rebooting. Thus you can try to restore a Word document not saved on Mac from the Recovered items folder in Trash bin.
Have tried all above methods but still failed to recover an unsaved Word document on Mac? To minimize the data loss, you are recommended to recover the latest version of the file.
In this era of digital documents prevails, both operating systems and document processors build in the feature to save a copy of different versions and allows reverting to a previous version easily. There are 3 ways to consider.
We all know that Mac Preview builds in the feature allowing users to revert to previous versions, likewise, we can also get the similar feature within Word for Mac. But note that Version history in Office only works for files stored in OneDrive or SharePoint Online.
For Office 2016 & 2019 & 2021:
For Office 365:
If you have turned the Time Machine ON, your Word documents will be well backed up and you are able to get a previous version of your Word document.
If the Word document is not created by you, go ask for the original Word document from the sender.
If you are the one created the Word document, it is much likely that the current Word document has went through different versions, so track down to see if you have sent out previous version before via emails/iCloud, or deleted in Trash Bin, if yes, get them back and rename it.
To find an unsaved Word document on Mac without going to autosave location, you can directly search on Mac using Spotlight. Press Command+F on your Mac, then enter a keyword of the file name, or sift through a bunch of files in .doc/.docx file extension.
It is true that Terminal helps us recover an unsaved Word document, but it just navigates us to the temporary folder and checks if the unsaved Word document is saved temporarily there. You can check the steps in the 3rd method in part 1.
But we can use Terminal to recover a trashed Word document on Mac with cd. Trash command.
If you have found the auto recovered Word document on Mac, you should open it in Word app, or use TextEdit if Word won’t open it. If TextEdit fails, try other word processors.
In the case that you’ve tried several word processors but still fail, or the file is just empty, the Word might have corrupted, either try Cisdem or online repair tools to fix it.
When the Word document is lost or deleted, the first thing you should do is to check the Trash bin. Since, all the removed items are transferred to Trash bin by default on Mac. Here are the steps to recover from Mac Trash.
To recover permanently deleted Word document on Mac, Cisdem can help, no matter you have a backup or not. And if you have a backup of the deleted file in OneDrive or iCloud, the process is quite straightforward. Here we use OneDrive to illustrate:
Windows users can easily find the Manage Document tool in Word app, it is located in the Info tab from Open menu, allowing users to recover unsaved documents or delete unsaved documents. However, there is no Manage Document tool in Mac Word app. Though both the Mac and Windows versions are designed with same workflow and functionality, there are slight differences on layout and others.
We’ve already put together a comprehensive guide here for you to restore a Word document on Mac, which contains multiple helpful options under different situations. Basically, you can recover an unsaved Word document easily with AutoRecovery, but if this doesn’t work or you need a reliable long-term data recovey solution, you should consider Cisdem, which is well worth paying to rescue your files when data loss happens.
Connie Yu has been a columnist in the field of data recovery since 2011. She studied a lot of data loss situations and tested repeatedly to find a feasible solution tailored for each case. And her solutions are always updated to fix problems from the newest systems, devices and apps.
Lynne
nothing in the autosave location. could you please help me recover an unsaved file remotely? i can pay.
Shirley C. Dominguez
Finally come across a tool recovering unsaved document directly. At the end, autosave didn't work, we still need a 3rd-party software to rescue the data.
Ashlin Brown
AutoRecover didn't work. Still I have no backups. Any other possible solutions to recover my deleted word document without the need of third-party tool? Please help.
Nick Bruce
So far, the fullest guide to recover a word document, I managed to recover the docx file in my icloud backup. Thanks.
Shawn Thomas
Awesome. This really helped me and I appreciate your work. Happy New Year 2018!