Autosave not working - no files are there

Anonymous
2014-01-12T05:27:19+00:00

I use autosave and have it set for every time minutes. I had a workbook open and was inputting data for many hours. I saw the taskbar show it autosave many, many times until it crashed. When I reopened excel, it reverted back to the last user saved version which was several hours old. I searched for the autorecover files, but they are the same old file. When I tried opening one, I get the error that happeend when it crashed - it says 'Excel cannot complete the task with available resources. Choose less data or close other application" (this was the error when it crashed in the first place)

I have plenty or memory available on my computer

I really need this fixed. Autosave does me no good if I can't recover my files.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-12-16T21:07:07+00:00

    I had a similar problem with Office365 Excel 2016 yesterday. My Autosave is set to 5 minutes and I have never had a problem with Autosave in the decades I have used Excel.

    Yesterday, Excel locked up while I had four spreadsheets open and I was trying to select a field in one spreadsheet. An hour later, Excel was still locked up (spinner was still spinning), so I restarted the computer.

    When everything was back up, one Autosave file had been created for each of the four spreadsheets, but the Autosaves were from 4-5 hours prior to the lockup. Even more interesting, it appeared the manual saves I had done on each document over the course of that 4-5 hours were completely gone. Can that even happen?

    I lost a lot of data. Very annoyed.

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-12-16T01:03:16+00:00

    The "autosave" feature is an emergency backup that in theory should have worked in this specific situation.  AFIK, Windows does not do a normal shutdown of Office applications, so the autosave backup should still be there. But the reality is that autosave is not reliable.

    In theory, you can setup Win 10 File History up to do "better" automated backup saves starting at 10 minute intervals or longer intervals if you wish. In practice I can't recommend it simply because I can't beat it into submission to make it work for me.  YMMV.

    Failing getting File History to work you can/should take advantage of 3rd party autobackup tools. I posted links to a couple of possible options earlier in this discussion. You can also google search for other options.

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-12-16T00:27:39+00:00

    Arghhh! I've just had the exact problem. I've had a spreadsheet open since the start of the month - saved it manually once in between but it should save every 10 mins via autosave. Windows forced a restart and update and I've lost everything! Initial saved file has gone as well! Hate the forced updates!

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-10-12T17:33:39+00:00

    My bet is that windows 10 is messing up the auto recover feature in Office , with it's "File History Backup Feature"

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  5. Anonymous
    2016-10-04T23:43:56+00:00

    Same exact problem. Very frustrating.

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