How to Recover Word Documents When PC Automatically Restarts

One of the most important thing that anyone who does their work in a computer must remember is to save their work as soon as possible. Not only that, they also need to regularly save the document after 5 or 10 minutes of working.

This is because there is always this danger of losing a document or files in a snap after an unexpected power failure or worse an automatic shutdown. I think anybody would understand how painful and frustrating it can be to lose hours worth of work in a snap. It would feel like you will do anything just to turn back the time and save that precious document.

Fortunately for MS Word users, there is this ever reliable Autorecovery feature which stores unsaved document in case of a power failure or any other form of sudden shutdown.

But then there is a hidden enemy – sometimes there is an automatic PC update which requires pc restart. The scary part about this update is that it automatically restarts the system when no action to postpone it is made. So when you leave your pc open for a while, the pc will restart by itself and you might lose any unsaved documents.

It happened to me a couple of times, and each time I thought I have lost the documents forever. The last time it happened, I refused to believe that it is really lost and decided to do some research partly because it was an important and long document. I hoped for a miracle and guess what- it worked! I learned that it is indeed possible to recover word docs when pc automatically restarts.

As the saying goes, prevention is the best cure. So MS Word users may want to do the following so they will have great chance of retrieving documents in case of an unexpected shutdown:

For those using MSWord 2003:

1. Go to Tools
2. Click Options
3. Click Save
4. Then check the following boxes:
• Always create a backup copy
• Save the documents after (you can set the desired minutes)

You can also do this:

1. Go to Tools
2. Click Options
3. Click File locations
4. Then look for the autorecover files and try to find the missing documents in the link you will see

Then you need to read the following:

Recover Word documents when pc automatically restarts.

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