Word is not saving changes to documents

Hiya,

It's not clear from your post one vital aspect of the process - when you finished working on the document each day and hit save (either ctrl-S, via the save button) did you close the document or leave the session open? My guess is that you did the save then put the PC into lock/suspend/hibernate mode.

I'm asking this because all of the issues I've seen seem to relate to several saves over a period of time, then there's a final closing of the document, and at this time the complete session is rolled back to the time the document was first opened. It's happened time and again to us, on user's own PCs and particularly on ours. Users generally run the version of Office 365 for higher education, we run Office Pro Plus 16.04738.1000 64 bit.

Since you did a copy and paste of the final save, in this case it's likely the damage was already done and you copy and pasted the rolled back version.

I've had limited success with recovering updated versions. It appears that every time you hit save a version is written. I know this because we originally thought the issue was USB-related and deep scanned a couple of them and found older versions of the documents (i.e. users said they saved every hour between 12 noon and 5pm and we found deleted copies of the document getting larger with timestamps around 1pm, 2pm, etc.

The problem I'm guessing you were working on you PCs hard disk, not USB, and the chances of recovery using a deleted data recovery tool successfully reduce. There's a good chance that the deleted files may have been overwritten, for example. The only clue I can give you is the files have the correct timestamp and, when on USB, are hidden deletions in the same folder as the original document.

Sorry I can't be of more use than this but, as you can probably guess from the thread above and many others (I've counted around 10 other separate similar threads) it's not even been acknowledged as a problem, never mind resolved. 

Good luck!

Just experienced the same issue. Worked on a document at a coffee shop in the morning, came home and opened up the file. Changes were there. Everything was fine at that point. Worked on the file again a couple of hours later, saved all the changed and closed word. When i started word and reopened the file all of the changes from earlier in the day were gone. It said the file was last edited over 24 hours ago. There were also no previous versions of the file when i checked.

I don't think the problem is OneDrive because I just encountered the same problem (aargh) and lost about 12 hours work and it just started.  I worked on this document yesterday and it was fine.  Today I lose everything!!!  However, at no time was I using OneDrive.  However, I did  just do a new install of Word 2016 because I am using my son's computer and he had an expired trial of Office 365.  If OneDrive is involved it is something that Microsoft has set without my knowledge when I did the install.

That's interesting. It sort of tallies with our thoughts that the session is being rolled back rather than not saving.

As I noted, we have 3 different institutions based here and they all have slightly different policies and options in place for OneDrive - mainly access options - but we've experienced issues with all three so we kinda thought it might be some generic OneDrive issue. I don't know the exact trail of events but we started to experience the issue at the start of summer and it's usual for changes to be implemented in the Summer when we're at our quietest. This would include making any changes to profiles, OneDrive implementation, etc.

Some of the students save to OneDrive by default and share work with others but the majority don't touch OneDrive at all. Since users are opening, saving then closing documents entirely held on USB then cloud settings shouldn't come into play at all, but we know how Word functions and never had an issue before so we're reluctant to put the blame there. We also know what patches have been applied to o/s and package and there's nothing dangerous that we can see so we're largely ruling that out. OneDrive is maintained at the other end so we don't know what changes have been made/applied and the symptoms seem to correspond partly with known behaviour so we're very, very wary about it.

My personal experience with OneDrive is not good. It's the best of the cloud packages that I evaluated, but it only works when you do a full sync. I tried to do drag and drop uploads and it reported all well, but when I checked the total directory sizes it only uploaded between 15 and 20% despite several retries.

Hi Marcel,

We would like to know more about your concern regarding the Word files. Kindly answer the questions below:

• Have you tried checking your OneDrive account?
• Did you save the edited files on a different folder?

If you saved the file with "Save As" option, there's a possibility that you changed the file name unnoticed. Try to search for other Word files on your computer and see if the edited files are present.