Losing important Word documents on your Mac can be a painful experience, especially when you lose some critical documents, research, or personal records. Luckily, Mac offers several recovery methods that you can try to restore lost Word documents. Here, in this comprehensive guide, we will discuss the top 3 ways to recover lost Word documents on Mac.
Whether you accidentally deleted a file, experienced a sudden power failure, or virus or malware attack on your device, this guide will help you to recover your valuable files quickly and easily. Read on this article to check the details!
What Causes Deletion of Word Files on Mac?
Before you learn methods for Word data recovery on Mac, it is important to find the exact cause of the issue of it. There are several reasons that cause the deletion of Word files on a Mac. Some of them are:
- Accidental Deletion: One of the main causes for the deletion of Word files on Mac is human error. You may have mistakenly deleted desired Word files while deleting other files and folders from your device.
- Emptying the Trash: If you empty Trash, it leads to permanent deletion of files from your device. In such cases, you need to use professional Mac data recovery software to recover deleted files/folders.
- Formatting: When you format your Mac’s hard drive or perform a clean OS reinstall, it deletes all files stored on it, including Word documents.
- File Corruption: Sometimes, a file gets corrupted or becomes inaccessible due to various reasons, like sudden system crashes, software bugs, or hardware issues. Such corruption issues can even cause the deletion of files from your device.
- Virus or Malware Attacks: Such malicious software can potentially infect your file system and delete or corrupt your Word files. To avoid such issues, you need to install updated antivirus software on your device and perform regular scans of your devices.
How do I Recover Lost Word Documents on Mac?
In this part of the blog, we will provide the top 3 ways to recover lost Word documents on Mac. You can go through the following data recovery on Mac methods one-by-one to get your deleted files back. Let’s start with the simplest method first:
Method 01: Recover Lost Word Document on Mac in Trash
Deleted Word files on Mac temporarily go to the Trash folder after deletion. Therefore, before you apply any data recovery method, check if the unsaved Word document is present in the Trash. To recover your lost Word document in the Trash, you need to follow the below-given steps:
- Open the Trash folder and locate and double-click on the “Recovered Items” folder to open it.
- Now, locate the deleted Word document that you need to restore.
- Move it to a safe location on your device and check if you are able to work on it.
If you are unable to find the lost Word file in the Trash folder, try the next solution.
Method 02: Recover Lost Word Document from the Temporary Folder
Microsoft usually saves your Temporary files in the TemporaryItems folder. Here are the detailed steps to recover Word documents not saved on Mac from the Temporary folder:
- Open Applications; go to Utilities and then double-tap the “Terminal”.
- In Terminal, type open $TMPDIR and then press the Enter button. This will open the TMP folder which stores the unsaved files on your device.
- Now, locate and open the “TemporaryItems” folder. Select the lost Word document that you need to restore and right-click on it. Choose Open With and then select Microsoft Word.
- After successfully opening files in Word, click File > Save As and save it to the desired storage location.
Method 03: Recover Word Documents with AutoRecovery
MS Word has a built-in AutoRecovery feature that automatically saves a Word document after some specific time, say 10 minutes. For this, you need to enable the AutoSave feature on your Word document. Check the following steps to set up the Auto Recovery feature on your device:
- Open Word, go to Preferences.
- Now, click Output and Sharing, then tap Save.
- Configure the option in the Save AutoRecover info box by entering how long you want the program to save documents.
Now, once the AutoSave option is enabled on your Mac, you need to apply the below-given steps to recover your lost Word documents with the AutoRecovery feature:
- Launch Finder, access Go and then Go to Folder.
- Now, type the path:
~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery.
- Select the Word document from the AutoRecovery folder that you would like to recover and then add the .doc extension to the file name.
- Open the Word file and then save it at the desired location on your device.
Recover Lost/Deleted Word Documents on Mac With Data Recovery Tool
If you fail to restore your lost Word documents on Mac with the above-mentioned methods, then you can try using professional Mac data recovery software. Third-party recovery tools, such as Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Mac can easily help you to get the Word files back. This data recovery software offers a simple and intuitive user interface which makes it very easy for beginners to restore deleted Word documents. Along with the simple user interface, the software also offers several amazing features, such as:
- It supports recovery of files deleted due to several reasons, such as accidental deletion, disk formatting, Word crashing on Mac, etc.
- Recover deleted Word files from any internal or external storage devices, including hard drives, SD cards, and many more.
- Enable you to preview the recoverable files first, so you can select and save only the required files.
- The software is compatible with all Windows and Mac OS devices.
Now, check the steps on how to recover lost Word documents on Mac using this Mac Data Recovery software:
- Download, install and launch Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Mac tool on your Mac. Select the type of file you need to recover and then tap the Next button. To recover only lost Word files, select Document.
- Now, from the Recover From window, select the storage location from where you need to recover lost Word files and tap the Scan button.
- Wait till the scanning process is completed. Preview the recoverable files; select the one that you need to restore and tap the Recover button to save them at the desired storage location on your Mac.
Wrapping Up
This guide explains the top 3 ways to recover lost Word documents on Mac. You can try these manual methods or use professional Mac data recovery software, such as Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Mac to restore your lost Word documents hassle-free. The software supports recovery of lost Word documents that got deleted due to accidental deletion, hard drive formatting, malware/virus attack, hard drive damage, etc.
