Document Recovery ( AutoRecover ) is not working for Excel 2016. System: Windows 8.1 64 bit Microsoft Excel 2016 MSO (16.0.8528.2126) 64 bit No fix even after a full Online repair of Office 2016 and, of course, all possible Office Updates. After working for hours on several Excel documents (which had previously been saved with a file name etc.), the power went out in our building. When the power was restored and Excel reopened, I was presented with the expected list of Recovered Documents on the left side. HOWEVER, every single one of these were simply "the Original version" or "the version last saved by user" (something like that). Meaning they did not contain ANY new data that had been entered since the last time I had saved them/reopened them despite the AutoRecover being set to 1 minute. NOTES : Document Recovery seems to be working for Word and PP. The settings in Options>Save are all the same for all Office products: currently set to AutoRecover every 1 minute. The ...AppData>Roaming>Microsoft>Excel folder contains no backup file/folder for new or reopened Excel Documents. Thank goodness, the AutoRecover does seem to be updating the equivalent folder for Word ("AutoRecovery save of DocumentX.asd" files get updated) and PowerPoint (the "pptXXX.tmp" file also updated). Edit: This is obviously some MSOffice Bug. Of the multiple 'test' spreadsheets I've been playing around with to study this, exactly 1 of them seems to actually back up. But absolutely no other ones and none of my previously created sheets ever backup to AutoRecover.

No. I did not hit Save, but as others have said, even that does not seem to guarantee anything. As for having hidden files displayed - Yes, I always have hidden files displayed. There were no hidden files in the location where Excel says that it stores the recovery files. As for not including more technical details, I doubt VERY much that that would have had any impact on getting a response from Microsoft. The original poster of this thread gave extensive details and all that they got back from Microsoft was a canned response that did not in any way address their concern. I am glad to hear that you are in the IT field. My background is electrical engineering, so I do understand technology. I've managed projects that involved hundreds of engineers spread over six sites and three countries. I've also had to address concerns from upset customers. Any thread that has gone on as long as this one has should have been addressed by Microsoft. For the most part, that has not happened. The issue is quite simple from the customer perspective. A feature that says "Save AutoRecover information every X minutes" should save AutoRecover information every X minutes. As someone with an IT background, I am sure that you can understand that having a program save a copy of a file every X minutes does not exactly constitute advanced programming. That is, unless you are dealing with spaghetti code.

Right, and that's BS. Cloud backup should be an option, not a requirement. The implementation has fouled up local backup somehow. This thing's getting daily responses and not a word from MS even in acknowledgement. This is core functionality by any measure. Do we need New York Times to look into this? I like this idea. It really does seem to be beyond the pale, even for a Microsoft product. Several people would need to write.

I just had a crash that cost me two days worth of work. I had three spreadsheets open - one .xls file and two .xlsx files. The .xls file autorecovered. The changes on the two .xlsx files were lost. All of the right boxes were checked on everything. When is Microsoft going to finally get around to fixing this?

I believe so: AutoSave as in the top-left corner of the Word and Excel is for saving on OneDrive. AutoRecover would be saving to your own hard drive, then getting recovered files in case of a crash. It's gotten confusing.

Excel 2016 AutoRecover not working - NO files being saved to the AutoRecover File location

Anonymous

Document Recovery (AutoRecover) is not working for Excel 2016.

System:

Windows 8.1 64 bit

Microsoft Excel 2016 MSO (16.0.8528.2126) 64 bit

No fix even after a full Online repair of Office 2016 and, of course, all possible Office Updates.

After working for hours on several Excel documents (which had previously been saved with a file name etc.), the power went out in our building. When the power was restored and Excel reopened, I was presented with the expected list of Recovered Documents on the left side. HOWEVER, every single one of these were simply "the Original version" or "the version last saved by user" (something like that).

Meaning they did not contain ANY new data that had been entered since the last time I had saved them/reopened them despite the AutoRecover being set to 1 minute.

NOTES:

Document Recovery seems to be working for Word and PP.
The settings in Options>Save are all the same for all Office products: currently set to AutoRecover every 1 minute.
The ...AppData>Roaming>Microsoft>Excel folder contains no backup file/folder for new or reopened Excel Documents. Thank goodness, the AutoRecover does seem to be updating the equivalent folder for Word ("AutoRecovery save of DocumentX.asd" files get updated) and PowerPoint (the "pptXXX.tmp" file also updated).

Edit: This is obviously some MSOffice Bug. Of the multiple 'test' spreadsheets I've been playing around with to study this, exactly 1 of them seems to actually back up. But absolutely no other ones and none of my previously created sheets ever backup to AutoRecover.

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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Answer accepted by question author

Anonymous

I finally found the right location of the autorecovery files for Mac users of Excel!

See: this post on this forum

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94 additional answers

Anonymous

2018-03-20T15:24:14+00:00

No. I did not hit Save, but as others have said, even that does not seem to guarantee anything. As for having hidden files displayed - Yes, I always have hidden files displayed. There were no hidden files in the location where Excel says that it stores the recovery files. As for not including more technical details, I doubt VERY much that that would have had any impact on getting a response from Microsoft. The original poster of this thread gave extensive details and all that they got back from Microsoft was a canned response that did not in any way address their concern. I am glad to hear that you are in the IT field. My background is electrical engineering, so I do understand technology. I've managed projects that involved hundreds of engineers spread over six sites and three countries. I've also had to address concerns from upset customers. Any thread that has gone on as long as this one has should have been addressed by Microsoft. For the most part, that has not happened. The issue is quite simple from the customer perspective. A feature that says "Save AutoRecover information every X minutes" should save AutoRecover information every X minutes. As someone with an IT background, I am sure that you can understand that having a program save a copy of a file every X minutes does not exactly constitute advanced programming. That is, unless you are dealing with spaghetti code.
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Anonymous

2018-03-20T05:55:34+00:00

Right, and that's BS. Cloud backup should be an option, not a requirement. The implementation has fouled up local backup somehow.

This thing's getting daily responses and not a word from MS even in acknowledgement. This is core functionality by any measure. Do we need New York Times to look into this?

I like this idea. It really does seem to be beyond the pale, even for a Microsoft product. Several people would need to write.
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Anonymous

2018-03-19T07:07:58+00:00

I just had a crash that cost me two days worth of work. I had three spreadsheets open - one .xls file and two .xlsx files. The .xls file autorecovered. The changes on the two .xlsx files were lost. All of the right boxes were checked on everything. When is Microsoft going to finally get around to fixing this?
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Anonymous

2018-03-18T22:26:18+00:00

I believe so: AutoSave as in the top-left corner of the Word and Excel is for saving on OneDrive. AutoRecover would be saving to your own hard drive, then getting recovered files in case of a crash. It's gotten confusing.
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