Word is not saving changes to documents

Dont save the document in OneDrive folder, save it anywhere else in the computer, and disable autosave. This will fix the problem, at least it worked for me, until Microsoft fixes the issue. I suspect it has to do with the synching feature of OneDrive, sometimes it malfunctions and takes the online version of the document as the latest copy of the same, when in fact it is the copy you save locally in you computer that has the most current edits. what then happens (i am thinking) is that it rolls back the changes in you local copy as if they are "outdated". That is why it is normally a days worth of work that is lost.My guess it is a bug in OneDrive.

My wife is a first-semester law school student student. She's been using Microsoft Word 2016 pretty heavily this last semester (much more so than either of us did before now). On three different occasions, she has observed this exact issue (twice on one document and once on another). She saves documents regularly, doesn't close without saving them, and knows the difference between Save and Save As. Every time this has happened, it's just been one day worth of work. The misbehavior that appears to be happening is that if Microsoft Word occasionally rolls back all saves that happen on a document during a session of it being open. She's going to try periodically closing documents throughout the day instead of leaving them open to see if that can curb the data loss. We really need a patch for this though. This is an awful behavior.

This appears to be an ongoing problem and I've yet to see an acknowledgement from Microsoft, let alone a solution.

Word seems to be malfunctioning and rolling back changes for a whole session with no warning, even when the user has hit Save/Ctrl-S.

We have been experiencing issues with this since late Spring/early Summer, although it may have been occurring before this and not noticed. It's not a direct Office365 although all our users have O365 we are a campus shared between 3 universities and each institution has different lock-downs in place. It is not and issue with opening up from email or detachable media. There are no auto backup copies because the files are being saved and closed correctly and these files are being removed. Similarly, because the file is being closed correctly the 'save last autobackup if closed without saving' is not triggered - i.e. there are no asd or tmp files in Appdata. 

We know users are saving correctly because, apart from them being experienced academics, when we've had examples on USB we've done deep scans and found saved .docx versions of the file that have been deleted (i.e. if they hit save every hour over 6 hours we've found progressively bigger versions of the file time stamped every hour). Since loading a new image based on 1803 with Office Pro Plus 16.0.4639.1000 64-bit the problem has been reduced, but still occurs. 

We are thoroughly fed up with trying to find lost work and breaking the news to users that the changes they've been working on have been lost due to a known issue with Microsoft Office. In many cases the users have been working hard for hours trying to get work ready for submission and they have missed deadlines, which affects their grades, the degrees they get and, ultimately, their futures. Not happy at all.

Further information can be found on this thread: Word 2016 changes made to file disappear after pressing the 'Save' button or Ctrl-S which itself has links to other similar threads at the end that I found with a brief search of this forum, but there's probably more.......

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.

This is a totally random observation that may help explain, or not.  I've had the same issue (seemingly lost edits to documents) recently where I will be working on a document, but will do a "save as" (because I sometimes save each revision) and am prompted to select a folder.  I select the folder and when it opens, where ever my curser is in the window, it will highlight whatever file it is pointing at and that same file name is auto-populated in the file name field at the bottom of the window.     If I'm not careful and I hit "save" before scrolling to the correct file in the list or typing in the name of the file I'm saving instead of what is in the auto-populated field,  the file will save and overwrite whatever file that the curser was on. 

If you have the same scenario when you save, one suggestion is open the folder and open other files that are shown to be updated around the dates you were working on the document.  It may have saved as a different file.   It happened to me a couple times.