Word is not saving changes to documents

Thanks for your tip. - for me it is too late.

I'm sorry to hear your problems but relieved it's not just me! Did you begin to experience these problems recently or has it been longer term? Are you running the latest versions/patches of W10 and Word? Are you logged into OneDrive? Do you get this just from USB or does it happen on your C: drive, network drive, etc.? Is it particular users or just yourself?

It's a nasty little gremlin that has the potential for massive impact. Not saving when one clicks on the save button is just a danger that really shouldn't happen - in my experience (35 years IT, 13 in an academic environment) this has never happened before in any operating system or package that I've worked with. We have vocational students as well as academics, teenagers to 70+ year-olds, full-timers, part-timers, etc. spread over 3 universities so there's a wide spread of IT experience and even if we could contact them, what could we say? "Save your work regularly but don't rely on clicking on the save button because it doesn't always work"? 

We can't even rely on the PDF option that you suggested. By definition, our users have very complicated documents - dissertations that contain tables, figures, questions, format changes, heavy use of Styles, captions, cross referencing, academic referencing add-ins and more - and opening these using Word reads some of the complicated stuff in as diagrams and loses some of the embedded navigation referencing. We can really only rely on PDFs for the users to be able to copy the raw text they've typed back into the document that was supposed to have saved when they clicked on the save button (better than nothing, but a solution to a problem that just shouldn't  exist).

We're just hoping that installing the latest image that contains all safe updates and patches resolves the problem. I'll keep you posted if we get any progress, in the meantime good luck!

I also am having the same problem. I am a microsoft certified professional, and I use word for work. 

IT's terribly costly and has caused me to send out reports that are missing data to my clients.

As you can see, microsoft does not seem to know, or care. Typical.

I recommend saving your document as an adobe pdf as soon as it is finished. That will lock in the changes you have made.

I know it's a clunky work around, but hopefully someone at MS will wake up and figure it out in the meantime.

Hi Swaggette

Thank you so much for your input regarding my problem. I checked the files that were updated around that time on the hard disk that I used. Unfortunately, the file was not there.

Hi Marcel,

We've been experiencing similar problems this summer. Students have been coming into the library at the university where I work and editing their dissertations, returning the following day and finding all changes have been rolled back.

We assumed this was a USB issue as these are the cases that have been reported to us, but you example is so close to ours but on a hard drive that I'm inclined to think that it may be more widespread than first thought.

In a nutshell, this is our experience:

• User creates a document, saves it
• User works on document (often at a later date)
• User says they do regular saves
• User exits with save
• User goes to edit document later (same machine or different), all changes rolled back

I'm very experienced recovering lost documents and have found no file fragments or autorecovery files. We enable autorecovery every 10 minutes as well as the 'make a backup copy if user exits without saving' option. I've checked the file locations and there's no files there. I've tested the functionality and both are working fine.

What is interesting (and may be of some help to you) is I ran a data recovery tool on the USBs and found copies of the modified file that have been deleted. I.e., if the user worked on the file from 12:00 to 16:00 and hit Ctrl-S every hour after adding a page we found a deleted copy at 13:00 with +1 page, 14:00 with +2, etc., yet Word seemed to revert all changes back to the original on exit.

I suspect a couple of things: first, Word 'manage versions' is rolling back randomly. I don't know why. Second, users automatically connect to OneDrive (although they rarely use it) and although the files are not stored there, I wonder if one of the synchronisation settings is causing it to roll back. 

I've had no solution to this and can find no information online. It's a critical issue that will massive problems if it's repeated when the students return. I've had four cases in the last month and suspect there were more earlier that were misdiagnosed but we've only had up to 30 or so students using the library during the summer break. In 2 weeks users return and we'd expect traffic of upwards of 2,000 per day. And if we're experiencing this problem then our sister campuses (8 more - we support 3 universities) will be experiencing exactly the same as their setup mirrors ours closely.

Here's the thread I started. If you get any solutions, workarounds or clues to the issue I'd be obliged if you could post them: Lost changes to documents after saving

* Edit - quick query Marcel. When you say you saved your document on your laptop over a period, did you fully close the document each time or did you save it then 'shut the lid'? I only ask because I wondered if the Word session remained open the whole time or it was several sessions.