Lost several day's worth of work in an Excel file?

Hello dear support,

I have windows 10 OS, I did follow all the 4 steps, mentioned above. My spread sheet was not there. The recycle bin was empty.

Where is my spread sheet?

Several days work was in it.

I know I saved it at 2:30 PM PST, on 1/14/24, today, but all the spread sheets files disappeared, and closed after I left my system to go grab a glass of water from kitchen, and I know I had saved it before the files were automatically closed. Once I was back, all 5-6 spread sheets were all closed.

How can I get that back?

Sam Abdollahi 425-229-8774 email ******@hotmail.com . Please reply to another email . ******@gmail.com

Thank you

Hello Ego,

Thank you for the update.

Hopefully storing files primarily on the machine and manually copying to OneDrive, will not repeat the problem.

You can also copy important files on an external drive for backup.

Also, check out the article below on how to back up files using the file history: https://answers.microsoft.com/windows/forum/all/how-to-perform-a-backup-using-file-history-in/d269ab57-69e9-4467-9d06-3f13631e47d4

If you have any more questions or need further assistance in the future, don't hesitate to reach out. I'm here to help!

Best regards, Oluwatosin.

Storage sense was already turned off. AutoRecover already turned on.

I was using OneDrive, that seems to have been the source of my problem!

I have been regularly saving a copy of the file onto my hard drive while re-doing the lost work. Which is a pain, but I'd rather not repeat the problem.

In future I will return to my old way of doing things - storing files primarily on my machine and manually copying to OneDrive items I need on another machine; and only relying on OneDrive for things that are not important.

It would be nice to have a feature which saves a file to multiple locations simultaneously in order to always have a backup.

Hello Ego,

Thank you for the update. I'm sorry to hear that the troubleshooting steps do not help in resolving the issue.

On your windows 11, kindly confirm if Storage Sense is not turned on.

Open the Settings app and select System.

Click on Storage in the left pane and then toggle off the switch for Storage Sense in the right pane.

As suggested, it is a good idea to back up your files with OneDrive

As an extra safeguard, you can set up AutoRecover in your app.

Go to File > Options > Save.

Make sure the Save AutoRecover information every x minutes box is selected.

Make sure the Keep the last auto recovered version if I close without saving box is selected.

You can refer to the article: https://support.microsoft.com/office/save-back-up-and-recover-a-file-in-microsoft-office-a7f0a209-ad22-4212-bb53-6cd8e801a6fb

https://support.microsoft.com/office/help-protect-your-files-in-case-of-a-crash-551c29b1-6a4b-4415-a3ff-a80415b92f99

If you have any more questions or need further assistance in the future, don't hesitate to reach out. I'm here to help!

Best regards, Oluwatosin.

Thanks for the response, but unfortunately none of those tips worked for me. (The first 2 appear to go to exactly the same place, there were no temp files to recover and the file was not in the recycle bin).

Any other ideas?

Otherwise, looks like I have to rush to redo the work before the meeting I had prepped it for.

:(

Any tips for how to prevent such an occurrence in future?

FWIW I am old enough that saving frequently is a deeply ingrained habit, despite the auto-save functionality, so I definitely didn't neglect to save it!

I will be wary of trusting OneDrive in future, that's for sure.