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
    2018-02-15T16:00:39+00:00

    I just had this problem yesterday, none of my docs were autosaved and none were set to 'Disable AutoRecover' - why would anyone ever do that anyway!

    So frustrating to find out that this is an issue MS have known about since last year and its not fixed!

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-02-14T23:41:20+00:00

    I have the same issue. Everything is set up to autosave correctly, but my excel file is not autosaving and I lost a couple of hours work yesterday. I have 'repaired' my Office installation and checked the file for corruption issues and it still isn't autosaving. What is really annoying is the lack of response from MS in this thread about this issue!

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-02-14T21:35:18+00:00

    Same problem here.  Excel seems to be crashing more frequently and auto-recover is not working.  I've tried setting it with some simple dummy files with minimal info and no recovery file is ever made.

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-02-14T08:19:28+00:00

    Same as everyone listed here. Hours and hours of work in Excel 2016, and Windows 10 forces an update and automatic restart while I'm out of the room. After reboot, no autosaves are found. Back to square one. Utter garbage, especially considering this thread is four months old.

    My settings, showing that autosaves should indeed be generated.

    16,

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