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
    2017-02-16T17:59:30+00:00

    All Microsoft products I encounter are completely unstable. Indeed they are the number one cause for efficiency disruption in my company. I am genuinely starting to believe that the next global economic boom will be founded upon the withdrawal of use of Microsoft applications. They have been slowly going downhill for years; removing useful tools, becoming more and more unreliable, not being able to cope with large amounts of data, crashing at an ever growing rate. Data loss in excel has just happened to me with 0 recovery or autosave files in the name of that document???

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  3. Anonymous
    2017-02-27T19:45:41+00:00

    I have been having the same general issue.  I thought it was working on files that are stored primarily on a USB drive.  

    Ran a test - still working with original on USB drive.  Created a new autosave folder (on a networked drive).  Pointed autosave to that folder and asked MS Word to save a copy every 2 min.  20min later, nothing in that folder.

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  4. Anonymous
    2017-04-11T12:44:38+00:00

    Can someone resolve this urgently!!!! Worked on a file for an hour, then crashed and no recovery of unsaved documents available.

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  5. Anonymous
    2017-08-01T12:46:08+00:00

    I've just encountered this problem as well.

    Excel locked up and after an hour I gave up on it and force quit the program, thinking I could just get the autosave version and at most I'd only lose 10mins work (my autosave is set to 10 mins).

    Open up excel again and what do you know, not autosave versions.

    Interestingly though, it has autosaved other excel files I had open at the time, but it has no record of the one I was working in.

    Is it likely to be a bug in the file itself then?

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