Word is not saving changes to documents

I agree, but there are between 6 and 8 thousand students on our campus alone (and many thousand more on our sister campuses) and there's no way that we can advise users not to use memory sticks. It's not so much a problem of document corruption (it's surprisingly rare) but more because of unencrypted sticks getting lost.

And it still doesn't resolve the problem. When we've had to explain to users that all the work they did the day before on their thesis has been lost despite them saving it regularly to the C: drive or network drive I'm surprised more of them haven't put in complaints to the university authorities.

If you have been advised not to save directly to USB sticks from within Word, that is good advice.

I would go so far as to say that it is irresponsible to ignore such advice, because saving directly to removable media almost inevitably leads to document corruption.

You can still copy files to a USB stick, for example for backup purposes, as long as you edit the documents on the computer's hard drive.

Thanks for the reply, but no, the drives can be ruled out. Our university drives are very resilient, and if the drives failed then the file save process would report that the file could not be saved on each occasion over the 8+ hours they were working on their projects.

Users also multi-task, downloading research material, working on Excel spreadsheets to build tables and graphs to insert in their work, etc. Other materials saved fine which indicates the network drives were performing as required. We also operate 3 different universities on campus so their network drives are on different servers at different locations. Lastly, we've seen the problem occur on USB sticks (the advice from Microsoft was not to use them rather than address the problem), network drives and C: drives on laptops. 

As previously noted, hitting the save button/ctrl-S multiple times during the session appears to save the file and there are no reports of failures. When the problem was first reported we assumed that the issue was with USB sticks, but this was a red herring

• most users rely on USB sticks for their primary material (we encourage them to make at least one other backup for obvious reasons) so we were simply seeing it more with them. 

After checking the autorecover and exit without saving file locations (nothing in either) we ran file recovery software on some of the USBs and discovered that there were deleted copies of the file at intervals (say 8 of them over a 4 hour period, and the user said they were hitting save every 30 minutes) each iteration of the file getting progressively larger and the final deleted version was the final version they'd been working on. Word then rolled the whole session back, reloaded the initial copy and wrote this to the drive. 

We are furious about this, and students are absolutely distraught when they discover their degree work has been ruined (and I can't blame them). We've had no acknowledgement of the problem yet even a cursory search of this forum shows that it's been happening to a lot of users.

1. No, it was not saving to OneDrive. It was on the user's network drive.

The most likely culprit here would be the network location, unless you are saying that saving fails consistently on the hard drive as well.

For sure when it was saved to my hard drive. I am not sure if it happened with OneDrive, but I think so.

The versioning feature was removed from Office several versions ago, so you must have been using an old version, if versions were being used on the local drive.

In a previous message, you wrote that a reinstallation fixed the issue. Are you saying that it has now come back?

If the issue has returned, have you tried troubleshooting add-ins? See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/921541/how-to-troubleshoot-problems-that-occur-when-you-start-or-use-word. (Apologies if you have already tried this. In a long thread such as this one it is getting difficult to keep track.)