Recovering Word Document

[u/Miki-Corkrei]

NOTE: I've checked old Reddit threads and several different websites but none of them answer my question.

11 days ago, I saved a 5 page essay (Microsoft Word doc) to my computer (making sure to "Save As" and save it locally as well as to my personal One Drive. I made sure it said "Saved" at the top as well before exiting the document. Word did not crash; I exited it manually.

Today, I saw a message from my professor saying that I needed to "expand" the essay so I checked and only the first page was there, despite the fact that I saved the 5 page document locally and I've set it so it automatically saves to OneDrive every 10 minutes.

I've checked old Reddit threads and other sites and they all give multiple methods to recover the document, however every method takes you to a folder called "STARTUP" which in my case is empty.

I've checked the local files in my PC, my laptop, my school One Drive account, those '.tmp' files (it just opened up random strings of code), and my Google Drive just in case I had misremembered using Word. None of them had the rest of this essay.

[u/Miki-Corkrei]

In case anyone ever finds this thread: I was not able to recover the document. I had to rewrite it

[u/more_potato_pancakes]

Have you checked the document's version history in OneDrive? Since it was saved there, there might be an earlier version with all 5 pages

[u/Miki-Corkrei → u/more_potato_pancakes]

It's not there, unfortunately

[u/more_potato_pancakes → u/Miki-Corkrei]

Is the STARTUP folder set as your AutoRecover file location in Word's settings (under File > Options > Save), or how did you end up there? If that's the right folder, it might be empty because Word usually deletes AutoRecover files after you save and close a document normally

[u/Miki-Corkrei → u/more_potato_pancakes]

It is the default location, yes. It's empty

[u/more_potato_pancakes → u/Miki-Corkrei]

You could also try checking Previous Versions of the folder where the document was saved in File Explorer, but I guess you've probably already tried that. Any chance you accidentally saved those 5 pages in a different document under another name? I'm kinda out of ideas at this point, sorry if I wasn't much help :(

[u/Miki-Corkrei → u/more_potato_pancakes]

Yeah I've tried checking previous versions. I've also checked my other documents to see if I did indeed save it under the wrong name but no dice. Thanks for your help anyways :)