How To Recover Deleted, Lost or Unsaved Word Documents?

Table of Contents

• About recovering deleted / lost / unsaved Word documents
• Word file recovery guide #1: How to recover deleted / lost Word documents?
  • Method #1: Restore deleted Word documents from Recycle Bin
  • Method #2: Retrieve lost Word documents from backups
  • Method #3: Recover deleted / lost Word documents using Word file recovery software
• Word file recovery guide #2: How to recover unsaved Word documents?
• How to avoid Word document loss issue?
• Conclusion

About recovering deleted / lost / unsaved Word documents

Microsoft Office is one of the most frequently used applications in working or daily life and Word, Excel, PowerPoint documents makes it possible to work without paper. In most cases, these documents contain very important content for users, and thus it will be a despairing thing to know a Word document that you've spend days working on cannot be found on your computer. It can be a pathetic experience if you have no idea on how to recover deleted or lost Word documents.

There are quite a few causes that can lead to Word document loss and some are listed below:

• Delete Word documents by mistake: you may empty the Recycle Bin or delete files using Shift + Delete keys.
• Sudden power failure: a sudden power outage occurs when you are editing a Word document file, after which you are likely to lose unsaved content.
• Virus: virus or malware may encrypt, destroy or delete files and cause data loss issue.
• Formatting: formatting can remove all files of an entire partition quickly.
• RAW drive: partition turns to RAW and cannot be accessed.

The good news is that deleted or lost files are not wiped permanently from hard drive, and you have chances to get back them easily. Next, let's take a look at how to recover deleted or lost Word documents in Windows 10/8/7.

Word file recovery guide #1: How to recover deleted / lost Word documents?

This section will offer several solutions with which you can easily restore deleted or lost Word documents. If you've accidentally deleted important Microsoft Word document files, don't panic, just follow solutions below to retrieve permanently deleted or lost files in Windows 10/8/7.

Method #1: Restore deleted Word documents from Recycle Bin

There is possibility that deleted Word documents are lying in the Recycle Bin. As to Windows users, sometimes Recycle Bin can be a lifesaver. When a file gets deleted from local hard disk, it will be put into Recycle Bin and it keeps staying there until the Recycle Bin gets emptied. This is the default file deletion process in all Windows operating systems thus you can restore deleted easily before emptying Recycle Bin. Here's how:

Step 1. Open Recycle Bin. Find the 'Recycle Bin' icon on your system desktop and double-click it.

Step 2. Locate the needed Word document files.

If there are too many files in Recycle Bin, you can find desired files by way of searching file names, sorting data, etc.

Step 3. Restore deleted document files. Select all files you want to restore and right click on them to click Restore option. After that, these Word documents will be restored to the original location before deletion.

This method does not apply to following scenarios:

• Word document files are deleted by Shift + Delete keys, which just bypasses the Recycle Bin.
• You've deleted these files from Recycle Bin or Recycle Bin gets emptied.
• Word document files are deleted from external devices such as USB flash drive, SD card, external HDD, etc.

Although you cannot restore deleted Word documents in this method, this does not mean they are lost forever. You can continue with other recovery methods below:

Method #2: Retrieve lost Word documents from backups

If you keep backups for important files and carry out backup in regular, you are likely to find wanted files via searching backups.

Way #1: Restore deleted Word Documents from OneDrive

It's been a while that Word document files can be synced to the cloud drive such as OneDrive, making it easy to access files anywhere. If you are a user of OneDrive, you can upload files to your OneDrive account as a backup. When you find some files gets lost or deleted, you can open this online storage space and check if a backup is available.

What if you've deleted files from OneDrive? No worries, OneDrive also provides a Recycle Bin which holds files deleted from your account for up to 30 days, which means you can restore deleted OneDrive files within that period of time.

Way #2: Retrieve deleted Word Documents from Microsoft backups

If you cannot retrieve deleted Word documents from Recycle Bin or cloud storage, you may give a shot of Word itself. If you have enabled the backup function, you can get back lost Word documents like this:

Step 1. Open Microsoft Word and click Files tab. Then click Start menu from the left.

Step 2. Type *.wbk in the searching box and hit Enter key.

If needed files show in the file list, then repeat this step: search for files that use .wbk extension. If the file can be found, then open it. If not, move to step 3.

Step 3. Click Options menu from the left and choose Save tab from the pop-up Window. Now you can easy file the item "AutoRecover file location", click Browse button to open this path, after which you can find the backup files.

Moreover, since many companies create backups on a daily or weekly basis, you can also try recovering deleted or lost documents from those backups. If your company has an IT department, you can seek help from IT experts to restore deleted files from automatically created backups.

Method #3: Recover deleted / lost Word documents using Word file recovery software

Free download Word file recovery software

If the first two methods fail to get back lost Word documents, you can try utilizing Word file recovery software. An effective Word file recovery program can help you recover lost Word document files safely and quickly. If you are looking for a reliable recovery program to recover permanently deleted files, the suitable option is DiskGenius.

ô  Free Download

DiskGenius supports to recover Word documents lost due to deletion, formatting, software corruption, RAW drive, partition loss, virus attack and many other reasons. The Word file recovery process goes deep into your hard drive or other storage device to look for recoverable files and it will restore deleted or lost Microsoft Word documents with original names and directories. What's more, DiskGenius can perform the file recovery from hard drives, external HDD, flash drive, SD card, RAID, dynamic disks, virtual disks as well as NTFS/FAT/exFAT/EXT2/EXT3/EXT4 drives. Apart from Word file recovery, DiskGenius also applies to Excel file recovery, PowerPoint file recovery, PDF file recovery, photo recovery, deleted video recovery, SD card recovery, Recycle Bin recovery, RAW drive recovery, format recovery, lost partition recovery, etc.

Besides, DiskGenius provides free trial edition which can scan device and preview lost Word document files, by which you will be able to make sure if this tool can recover your files correctly prior to purchase. Thanks to this Word file recovery software, you can perform the recovery at home on your own without spending hundreds of dollars on data recovery services.

Here's how to recover permanently deleted Word documents:

Step 1. Free download and install DiskGenius on your computer. Then launch it.

Note: Do not install the software on the partition that needs recovering data.

Step 2. Select the location where deleted or lost Word documents were stored and click File Recovery button.

In this step, you should make clear which drive is the one that contains lost Word files. If the drive is on a removable diks, then connect it to computer in advance.

Step 3. Scan the drive to look for all lost data.

Here, you can specify scanning methods, for example, Recover Deleted Files will search for deleted data only, while Complete Recovery will carry out a full scanning to look for lost files caused by formatting, RAW drive, etc. If you choose Search For Known File Types, the software will perfom a deep scanning so as to find out more recoverable data.

DiskGenius will scan the selected partition after clicking Start button from the pop-up window, and it will display lost files during scanning.

Step 4. Preview lost Word documents and locate what you need.

Once the scanning process shows recoverable files, you can preview them to check if they are wanted files. Double-click a file on the right pane, you can preview Word file content on a pop-up windows, as follows. If the file can be previewed properly, it means the file is not damaged and can be recovered correctly.

Step 5. Save and recover your Word files.

The last step requires that you should copy and save needed files to a different location. Select wanted files in scanning result, right-click on them and choose Copy To option. Then you can simply specify a location to save these recovered data.

You may also be interested in:

• How to recover my deleted photos?
• How to recover deleted files from PC in Windows 10/8/7?
• How to recover permanently deleted files in Windows 10/8/7?

Frequently asked questions on recovering deleted Word documents

1. Is DiskGenius free recovery software?

DiskGenius Free Edition allows users to scan and preview lost files, which helps to verify recovery quality before purchase. If you want to use freeware only, you may as well try Eassos Recovery Free which can save 1GB files free of charge.

2. How can I check if lost documents are recoverable before purchase?

The file preview feature can help you check if lost files are corrupted before final recovery, thus you can fully check recovery quality before purchase.

3. How to recover lost Word documents from deleted partitions?

You can use Partition Recovery function to search for lost or deleted partitions. Then you can restore lost partitions as well as files in those partitions.

4. I cannot open recovered files, why?

One possible reason is that lost files gets partly or complete overwritten. In this case, you can preview files recovered by type and see it they can be opened. Also, you can contact software tech support to help you find out solutions.

Word file recovery guide #2: How to recover unsaved Word documents?

You must have experienced a similar situation that you are working on a Word document and then close it accidentally without saving it. Does that mean the file is gone? Do you have to recreate the file and start all over again? In some cases, you can easily recover the unsaved the Word file. How to recover unsaved Word documents 2007/2010/2013/2016/2019?

Step 1. Open Microsoft Word and click File tab.

Step 2. Then choose Info menu from left and click Manage Document > Recover Unsaved Documents, as follows:

Step 3. Select the file you want to recover and click Open button.

How to avoid Word document loss issue?

Here are some noteworthy points that can help you avoid losing Word document files:

• Save file content in time: you can always press CTRL + S keys to save file after making changes. Also, you can enable the Auto-Save function that can save files for you automatically.
• Do not save files on desktop: generally, system desktop belongs to a folder of system partition which generates large amount of read or write actions all the time. That means, it will be quite hard to get lost files recovered successfully from desktop.
• Use UPS: UPS (Uninterruptible Power supply) provides backup power when your computer encounters sudden power outage. Thus, you can rest assured and won't be worried about data loss caused by electricity cut-off.
• Back up files in regular: you can back up files to either external disks or cloud storage, just back up files in time.

Conclusion

That's it! All possible methods to recover Word documents are explained here, and now you can easily recover lost or unsaved Microsoft Excel and Word document files. If you do not want to try all of them one by one, just try the most effective solution to recover lost data. With DiskGenius, whatever the data loss situation, there is a good chance that you can restore lost files via simple steps. This tool supports recovering lost Word files created by Microsoft Office from 2002 to 2019. The key thing to remember is to stop using the device before files are recovered to prevent data overwritten. Download the free edition and recover files now!