As a matter of course, you should be regularly saving your work in Microsoft Word. The more changes you make to a document, the more often you should save it. However, there may be times when Word closes before you’ve had chance to save your latest changes, for example if your computer crashes.
Fortunately for us, Word saves your work behind the scenes via its AutoSave facility. AutoSave works together with AutoRecover to help you get back documents that otherwise might be lost.
Changing AutoSave and AutoRecover Options
To change the AutoSave and AutoRecover options, click the File tab > Options, and click Save on the left. This section allows you to change many AutoSave details, the main ones being covered below.
Click to enlarge
- Ensure that the checkbox next to Save AutoRecover information every x minutes is checked, and change the number of minutes to reflect how regularly you want Word to save your documents.
- Keep the last autosaved version if I close without saving does just that. Sometimes in the heat of the moment we acidentally click “No” when we close Word and it asks whether we want to save our changes. This option allows us to recover our “unsaved” document.
- AutoRecover file location specifies where our AutoSaved versions go. You can actually see the AutoSaved documents using Windows Explorer.
- Default file location specifies where documents get saved by default.