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.

Just a suggestion, watch your Macros. I asked our IT Department before deleting the App folder suggested and he made the good suggestion of making a backup first of it. Glad he did because I went to use some Macros today and the file had been in that folder. He recovered it for me and I'm good to go. Haven't had the system crash so not sure if the "fix" will work for me but sure willing to try it.

This has definitely worked! I crashed yesterday and it recovered fine :) thanks again Andrew!

Looking forward to trying this. Thank you so much for this suggestion! I just lost about 20 minutes this afternoon due to this darn issue. Not a ton of time but still annoying. Just figuring out what I had done since the last save was as annoying as re-doing it.

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 So far this has worked! The real test will be if it recovers after a crash. I will keep you all posted! Thanks again :)

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

2018-03-28T20:57:20+00:00

Just a suggestion, watch your Macros. I asked our IT Department before deleting the App folder suggested and he made the good suggestion of making a backup first of it. Glad he did because I went to use some Macros today and the file had been in that folder. He recovered it for me and I'm good to go. Haven't had the system crash so not sure if the "fix" will work for me but sure willing to try it.
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Anonymous

2018-03-27T16:57:46+00:00

This has definitely worked! I crashed yesterday and it recovered fine :)

thanks again Andrew!
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Anonymous

2018-03-23T18:39:39+00:00

Looking forward to trying this. Thank you so much for this suggestion!

I just lost about 20 minutes this afternoon due to this darn issue. Not a ton of time but still annoying. Just figuring out what I had done since the last save was as annoying as re-doing it.
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Anonymous

2018-03-23T17:52:41+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

So far this has worked! The real test will be if it recovers after a crash. I will keep you all posted!

Thanks again :)
Was this answer helpful?

0 comments No comments