Autosave not working - no files are there

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>

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!

I am having the same issue.  Also the manual save does not work UNLESS YOU CLOSE THE PROGRAM.  If you have been manually pressing the save button and your computer or excel crashes, or the computer is shutdown without closing Excel you WILL lose your files and be forced back to an earlier version of the file that was saved the last time the program was shut down properly.  At my company we have lost 30-40 hours worth of combined work due to this issue.  Most recently this morning when (having manually saved my spreadsheet repeatedly) a Windows update tried to run and crashed my computer.  I have auto-recover set to create a recovery file every 5 minutes.  When I rebooted everything was gone and the only file available was the one created yesterday.  PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE get this fixed.

...  Also the manual save does not work UNLESS YOU CLOSE THE PROGRAM.  If you have been manually pressing the save button and your computer or excel crashes, or the computer is shutdown without closing Excel you WILL lose your files and be forced back to an earlier version of the file that was saved the last time the program was shut down properly. ...

I know you and others have reported this problem, but I have not experienced it. I simulated it by creating a workbook and manually saving changes to it. Each time, in File Explorer, the workbook's date-modified changed. Then I used Task Manager to kill the Excel process without allowing it to shut down normally, and the workbook still had all my saved changes. I went through the same process both on my local (C:) drive and on a network drive.

All I'm saying, though, is there must be some other factor that is causing yours to fail. I wonder how our systems are different.

One thing I discovered that helped "solve" the problem is that certain Excel files have a box checked in the Options settings that prevents it from being Autosaved.

Options --> Save --> uncheck box that says, "Disable AutoRecover for this workbook only" --> OK

This was something that most of my inherited files had checked and why there was never a AutoRecover version for me to re-open. Thought I could just uncheck the box on each of these existing files when opened but today after a crash I discovered that the box was checked for a couple of files I created myself.  I have no idea if this results from a MS glitch or if it is from something my employer's IT group sets as default when installing the Office suite. It's certainly nothing I would have done myself.

In any event, this tip may help you save precious work as it has done for me - but you'll have to be diligent about checking this for each individual Excel file, including those created by you - and remember to save the file after making the change.