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!

Hey,

Thank you, your post gave me a lot to think about, and so far as I am aware when I initially begun adding changes on the Monday I did leave the file open over night until the Tuesday however it was closed and the PC was switched off on the Tuesday evening (as when I leave the PC on it has a blinking light that is annoying to sleep whilst on). Otherwise, I would find the situation your describing as the same as if would give reason to why the 2 files were both registering the last save date as that monday (despite one of them not even existing until thursday)

I don't know whether this has any relevence but on the Thursday day I did a few hours of work on the morning and left the session open whilst I went to visit friends, and then returned a few hours later in which the PC would've been in hibernation mode before continuing the work.

I've also seen a couple of people mention the installation of OneDrive having an effect but I don't actually use it, or haven't so on my more recent PC.

I have discussed what happened with one of my friends (a computer scientist) and my dad (who was familiar with PCs and Applications) but he was quite confused. Naturally it would be easier to assume I hadn't saved it properly or it had been deleted but my partner was not there all week and when it comes to important hand-ins I'm usually very careful (I know, most will say the same).

Your response is the best I've seen but unfortunately  on the Wednesday (after I had saved and shut down on the Tuesday) I opened my files and the changes I had made tuesday were there, and I proceeded to save and shut down that wednesday and thursday night (again the light is irritating when trying to sleep). It was only after I saved the final draft of the assignment and renamed the save that this happened.

I hope some of this is useful to someone, as I said I've accepted the document is gone and finished my assignment now, I've just never had such an unusual occurrance with word before.

Thank you for your response

Hi,

I am having real trouble saving documents received by e mail and also with saving changes to documents. Please provide a solution.

Jo Watson

Which version of Word are you running, and which operating system? 

In Word for Windows, at least, it is normal for each e-mail attachment to open as read only, which means that you will have to save it under a new name. Press F12 (FN+F12 on some keyboards) to display the Save As dialog box.