Lost Data in Word

John was working in Word and got a pop-up which said something like "Word has lost data due to X. Files open must be closed." The program crashed, and when he opened his documents back up, the work he had done for the last week had disappeared. John realizes the work may be forever lost, but he wonders what causes this type of error and what he can do to protect himself.

It is impossible to know what caused John's error as it could have been just about anything that caused it—the complexity of the documents, the number of open documents, the amount of memory in the system, what other programs were open, how much disk space was available, where the open documents were saved, the current phase of the moon, and what song was playing on the radio at the time. (Well, OK, the last two factors were tongue-in-cheek, but you get the idea.)

It is possible that if the error occurs regularly that the number of variables can be winnowed down and a potential cause determined, but that would take a lot of work and time. It would probably be more productive for John to change a few work habits and, thereby, limit any future damage. In other words, do a couple of things to "protect himself," as John requested.

The first thing to do is to only keep open the documents on which you need to immediately work. If you know you will be working on five projects during the day, it is tempting to open all the documents you'll need for those five projects, all at the same time. It is better, however, to focus on one project at a time and only open the documents necessary for that single project. The benefit is that the documents for the other four projects—since they are not open—are safe from any damage that may be caused by Word crashing.

The second thing to do is to save your changes regularly. John said he lost a week's worth of work ("the work he had done for the last week had disappeared"). If this wasn't just hyperbole, then John should really save his work more often than weekly. It is a good idea to get in the habit of clicking Save every five or ten minutes. (And it really is a habit that is easy to develop.)

Of course, this must be tempered by where your files are saved. Let's say that John's files are saved on a shared drive in the cloud. If John is "out of pocket" for a while and not connected to that drive, the cloud software may save the file locally until such point as connection with the cloud can be established. So, let's say that (1) John is disconnected from the cloud for a week, (2) Word crashes during that week and wipes out the local copy of the document, and (3) John happens to be connected to the cloud when Word is restarted. In that case, it is possible that the cloud software, not seeing a valid local copy of the document, will go out to the cloud and grab the most recent copy available which, at this point is a week old.

If such a scenario seems possible, then it is a good idea to change where your files are saved so that you always have a recent backup in a different location, as well. This could be in a different folder on your system, or even on a flash drive—the choice is yours and will affect how you save your documents and back them up.

Word has an AutoSave feature which you can enable, but it shouldn't be used as a substitute for regularly clicking the Save button. You can find out more about AutoSave at this tip:

https://tips.net/T10175

If you want to save to multiple locations, then you can try an add-in such as the following:

https://www.gmayor.com/SaveInTwoPlacesAddIn.htm

The bottom line is that while you may be able to minimize the frequency of catastrophes (such as system crashes) from happening, you cannot stop them. What you can do, however is limit the effect of those events by changing how you work with Word.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13189) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021.