[5 Solutions] How to Recover Old Word Documents Easily

How to find old Word documents?

Microsoft Word is widely used as a document editing tool that may be used to edit papers, record work, and more. It brings great convenience to your work and life. However, you may also encounter a situation similar to the one in the case: you can't find some of your old Word documents. Don’t worry, here we prepared 5 useful ways to help you find your old Word documents back without effort.

5 ways to recover old Word documents

After doing a global search on your computer, if you still can't find your old Word files, you can try to recover your lost Word files using the 5 ways here. After reading the tutorial below, you can choose a suitable solutions to have a try.

Way 1. Recover old Word documents via AutoRecover

First, there is a built-in feature in Word called AutoRecover. This feature can help you to automatically save your Word documents with a certain frequency. If you have enabled it on your PC, you can use it to recover your deleted Word documents fast.

If you have not turned on this efficient feature, you can follow the guide below to activate it:

On the Word page, choose File > Options > Save. And tick the box next to “Save AutoRecover information every x minutes” and “Keep the last autosaved version if I close without saving”, then click on OK. You can customize the time interval for backups.

If you have enabled AutoRecover, please refer to the guideline below to recover your old Word documents:

1. Navigate to C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles.

2. Find your old Word document here.

3. Switch to the Word page, choose File > Open > Recover Unsaved Documents. Select the Word document you want to recover, choose Open and save it directly.

Way 2. Recover old Word documents from Recycle Bin

How to recover old version of Word document? If you are not in the habit of cleaning the Recycle Bin, it is possible that your old Word files are still in the Recycle Bin. It is easy to recover deleted files from Recycle Bin then.

1. Open Recycle Bin on the desktop on your computer.

2. Locate your old Word document here. You can use the search feature to find it quickly. Then, right-click on the document to choose Restore in the pop-up window.

Way 3. Recover old Word documents via Manage Documents

If you want to know how to recover an old version of a Word document, you can use the Manage Documents feature in Word to find previous version of Word document. It will help you to save the document every 10 minutes automatically. Just go to recover your old Word documents with it:

1. On the Word page, click on File > Info > Versions, and you can choose a version of your old Word document.

2. Once you choose a version of your Word document, it will be opened automatically with a line of tip on the top. Press the Restore button to get your Word document back directly. And all the operation after this version will be overwritten.

Way 4. Recover old Word documents with Previous Versions

If you activated the File History feature on your PC, you can consider using the Previous Versions feature to recover the earlier version of your old Word documents. But if you haven’t made backups of your documents, please try the next method.

1. Locate the Word document and right-click on it to choose Properties.

2. You can select any version of the Word document, and press Restore.

Way 5. Recover old Word documents with an easy recovery tool

If you haven't made any backups of your old Word files, this method is best for you: use a simple file recovery software like MyRecover.

MyRecover allows you to recover any type of files like recovering lost Word documents, recovering missing Excel files, and photo images, emails, compressed files, and so on.

★Tips: In addition, MyRecover has its own shining points that can help you to recover data from different situations:

Compatible with all Windows operating systems including Windows 11/10/8/7 and Windows Server.

Keep the name, format, location of your recovered files.

Retrieve data from all kinds of storage devices like USB, HDD, SSD, SD cards, and more.

Provide high recovery rate and recovery speed for free.

To recover your old Word documents safely and fast, click on the button to download and install the MyRecover client on your PC first. Then here comes the easy 3-step guideline to recover your Word documents via it:

1. In MyRecover, hover the mouse over the drive, and click Scan.

2. You will see the deleted files and other missing files after Quick Scan/Deep Scan.

3. You can select a new location to store your recovered Word files. After configuration, click on the Recover X files button to recover your old Word documents easily.

To sum up

5 effective solutions to how to recover old Word documents have been introduced in this article. You can choose one according to the situation you met. If you want to recover your Word documents directly and easily, an easy file recovery tool like MyRecover is the best choice for you.