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

Anonymous
2023-09-11T07:06:01+00:00

I opened, edited and saved a file in Excel several times last week without issue. This included adding a new sheet, then editing it over several days.

The file is in my work account's OneDrive.

Today I opened that same file to find that all my recent work (the whole sheet) has vanished; it seems to now be a version from 2 months ago, according to the last saved date. So naturally there is nothing in version history, and I cannot find any way to check for unsaved recent changes, but in any case, it was saved and opened again several times last week without issue, so I wouldn't expect unsaved recent changes to contain anything except perhaps the most recent edit.

How is this even possible!! Is there any way to recover the many hours of work I have lost?

My device is Windows 11, I have a personal account and a work account on the machine (and I have checked; it wasn't saved in my personal OneDrive).

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | Other | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2024-03-18T20:27:42+00:00

    The same thing just happened to me. I had updated a spreadsheet all week last week, saving daily (it was my time sheet after all) and logging in today all the data from last week was gone. Thankfully I had a backup from 3/12/24 which had some data in it - but that data was gone from the sheet on open along with ALL the data from saves last week. This was locally saved on the HDD (have had problems like this in the past with One Drive and just started saving to the HDD instead). Since I had a backup of the file, I know that Excel did actually save the document last week which it seems to have lost those changes now. That backup was taken by our backup software.

    I went through the steps to see any unsaved workbooks (despite having saved and opened this document all last week while updating it) - there were no unsaved workbooks. There is no version history either.

    So yes, I would also like to know why all my saved work is gone today.

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  2. Anonymous
    2024-03-18T22:15:48+00:00

    Hello. I lost a file too :(

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  3. Anonymous
    2024-03-18T23:56:33+00:00

    I just had the same problem but i just happened to find it after an hour of panic! None of the methods mentioned helped me either. This may or may no be your fix or discovery. But my desktop has 2 accounts set up on it. One for work and one for personal. That means I also have 2 OneDrives. Well apparently, the only thing i can figure is that i orignally save my changes in my work One Drive, and somewhere along the line my last changes were saved in my personal under the Same Document title. The older one seemed to take precedence over the newest. My newest didn't even show up until my PC did an automatic sync as it must have been online only (not sure). But when i tried to open, a dialog box came up saying i have another version with the same name already open. I had to complete close out the work one before it allowed me to open the one i was missing......and ..Wah-lah !!! There it was. This a g;itch in MS for sure. I hope this helped someone

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  5. Anonymous
    2024-03-26T16:06:23+00:00

    I am so glad I can pay $99/year to have my files mysteriously disappear instead of spending $0 year to be able to find them on Google Sheets. You know that phrase "You get what you pay for?" Yeah, everything has an exception, and this is it.

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