We’ve all been there: crafting a crucial email or working on an important Word document, only to be interrupted or experience a technical glitch, causing us to lose our unsaved work. It’s a gut-wrenching feeling, and one that many of us have come to know all too well. However, there is hope! Recovering unsaved documents in Word 2021 is not as difficult as you may think, and there are a few methods you can try to retrieve your hard work.

First and foremost, it’s essential to understand how Word handles unsaved documents. By default, Word automatically saves your document as a temporary file at regular intervals. These temporary files are usually deleted when you close the document, but if Word crashes or you experience a power outage, these temporary files may still be recoverable. To locate these files, open Windows Explorer and navigate to C:/Users/Your Username/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Office/UnsavedFiles. Within this folder, you should find any unsaved Word documents that can be recovered.

Another method for recovering unsaved documents is to enable AutoRecover in Word. This feature automatically saves your document at specified intervals, ensuring that you have a recent version to fall back on if something goes awry. To enable AutoRecover, open Word and go to File > Options > Save. Under the ‘Save documents’ section, ensure that the ‘Save AutoRecover information every * minutes’ box is checked, and set the interval to your preferred timeframe. Keep in mind that this feature relies on your computer remaining on and the Word application staying open for it to work effectively.