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

Anonymous
2017-10-19T19:57:03+00:00

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:

  1. Document Recovery seems to be working for Word and PP.
  2. The settings in Options>Save are all the same for all Office products: currently set to AutoRecover every 1 minute.
  3. 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.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2019-01-29T16:59:09+00:00

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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  1. Anonymous
    2018-06-13T16:18:01+00:00

    Check out Andrew Main's comment from March. It fixed it for me! I still crash obviously, but it keeps my autorecover files now :)

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-06-13T04:10:59+00:00

    I have auto save on for every 3 minutes,  I save my work on a regular basis,  as in everytime I get up from my computer,  I had been working on 3 different excel spreadsheets at once and had put quite a bit of work in each one of them,  when all of a sudden I got a not responding,  I hit the wait for it to respond 4 times and it never went to that,  finally I closed out assuming that since I have auto save on at worst I would lose a few minutes of work,  NOTHING had been saved in the 4 hours I had been working,  yes I prob should have saved while in the middle of all the work but I didn't,  I do save when I stand up which is why I only lost 4 hours of work not almost 8 but WTF,  I have done all I am supposed to do,  and this is crap.  I already save everything each night in 2 locations because I have saved left and the next morning files were completely missing,  so I am a bit paranoid,  but to have autosave not doing anything what is the point.

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-05-09T14:45:22+00:00

    That does not address the question.  Autosave in Excel is buggy. You should at least say you are going to tell or ask the Office support/maintenance team about it. Truth does not hurt Microsoft image, not being responsive does.

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-04-18T22:09:13+00:00

    I was able to resolve this issue on my computer with windows 10 & O365.  I did a Online quick repair but that didn't seem to fix it. 

    Then i deleted the files in "C:\Users\userName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Excel"

    Then my test files and all of my other files started creating files in that directory every minute like they should have.  The "Keep the last AutoRecovered version if I close without saving" didn't start working until I did this as well.

    good luck

    Andrew's fix worked for me too. It's autosaving now. 

    But it means that the real answer is: "This is a known bug that Microsoft refuses to fix or even acknowledge, and your unsaved data is gone forever, despite the false reassurance of the autorecovery settings."

    Sorry people, just give up -- do not waste more of your time and tears and energy trying to get back your work, because you can't.

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