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
    2017-12-08T09:18:53+00:00

    same with me.  auto save NEVER works.  whatever you want to call it.  AUTORECOVERY or AUTOSAVE.  it just NEVER WORKS.  whats the point of even offering this if it never works?  nothing is ever saved in the folder.  The Auto save is never allowed to be enabled so im stuck with autorecovery and that never works.  why not just make it default?! seriously why do we have to enable this?  just make it the default and let us recover stuff because i work with many excel files and sometimes accidents just happen.  like just recently i was working with two files and i closed one file and didnt save it but it turned out to be the filed that i wanted to leave open and save down the line.  now i wasted all that time!  why do we have to be prompted to save it anyway?  duh of course we want it saved.  just save the darn thing somewhere i dont care.  it can't be this hard!

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-12-04T15:35:45+00:00

    Bottom line, we cannot rely on any MS autosave feature. They just don't work reliably.  What is even worse, is that I am now seeing more than one person reporting that manual saving apparently does not work too.  They did not reply on autosave, they used "real" saves during a long editing session, only to find the next day that they lost the whole day's work. Apparently you have to do a SAVE AS to a separate file name ... <sigh>

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  3. Anonymous
    2017-12-04T14:32:01+00:00

    I must say, as with many of the applications I use from microsoft, issues exist, the autosave problem being one of them

    Autosave?? what autosave???

    I find it unbelievable that a company of Microsoft size cannot produce a simple "autosave" function that works....I have spent may hours trawling other computers to help employees to recover work that they wrongly thought was being "Autosaved".

    Microsoft...hang your head in shame.

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  4. Anonymous
    2017-12-01T20:15:14+00:00

    I've had the exact same issue with some college work: I went to sleep at 4am after working on a document for 7 hours straight, only to find that it had reverted itself to a version from the day before with zero evidence that i had as much as opened the file.

    I found this out half an hour before the work was due in, so as you can imagine I got in a right state.

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  5. Anonymous
    2017-11-15T15:23:50+00:00

    I have noticed, that if you don't have a trailing slash () for the AutoRecover file location, Excel 2013 will not create any AutoRecovery files.  

    File Tab -> Options -> Save -> with 'Save AutoRecover Information every' X minutes turned, on, the value in 'AutoRecover file location' must be valid with a trailing slash. 

    E.g. "D:\Data\AutoBackups\Excel" doesn't work and the dialog doesn't complain when you click OK. No files are ever written there. 

    Change it to "D:\Data\AutoBackups\Excel" and Excel starts to create files there 10 minutes after open a file (provided you change something). 

    I'm beginning to think that Microsoft has changed the behavior of Word and Excel since I first posted on Oct. 27. Either that, or I was seriously mistaken about what they were doing.

    For example, I noticed that Word now forces a slash () at the end of the "AutoRecover file location." If I remove the slash and click "OK," then open the options again, the slash is back. (Excel does not do this--if you remove the slash, it stays gone.)

    I am also finding autosave documents in the "AutoRecover file location" in both Word and Excel. I can change the location option in both apps, and the autosave documents now appear there. If the app crashes (or is terminated), the autosave document remains there and is displayed as a recovery option when the app is next opened.

    Meanwhile, Word and Excel are now putting copies of the autosave documents in the "UnsavedFiles" folder if I close normally without saving them. They weren't doing that before, so they are now behaving more reasonably. (This is the %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles
    folder, and there does not appear to be an option to change it.)

    Back to Excel, it seems to be working correctly now even without the slash, though I think you're right that it was not working until recently. Thanks for the note.

    I thought it might be useful to say what version I'm using: Word is 15.0.4971.1002 and Excel is 15.0.4971.1000. The MSO version for both is 15.0.4971.1000.

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