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I have been working on a document in Word for a few weeks. I have been saving it to OneDrive, and editing it in Word online, macOS, and Android clients. I have been making edits to it multiple times a day, every single day.

Today (Saturday the 2nd of November), I accidentally erased a large chunk of text (that I wrote yesterday) from it before closing the document. When I got back into it and noticed my error, I thought, "no big deal, I can just restore it from the version history".

However, in the version history, I see that the last "version" is from Wednesday, before that text was written. enter image description here

I get the same versions if I go to OneDrive in the web browser.

I checked my Android devices, one of them had a version from before the text I need was written, another one had a version of after the text was erased.

The edits on thursday, friday and yesterday were mostly made in the native macOS client, with Auto Save on, (as it has to be as the document is saved in OneDrive), and the computer was constantly connected to the Internet.

Is it normal for Word to not save any version history for several days like this? Is there any chance to restore my missing text?

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  • Search the last-deleted file in the Recycle Bin.
    – harrymc
    Nov 2, 2019 at 15:12
  • @harrymc I never deleted any file. Text was erased from a document. Moreover, this file was saved directly to OneDrive from Microsoft Word, not locally on my machine.
    – Fiksdal
    Nov 2, 2019 at 15:15
  • @harrymc Or do you mean my OneDrive recycle bin? There was nothing in there.
    – Fiksdal
    Nov 2, 2019 at 15:22
  • No, I meant locally, unfortunately. Last idea: Try to look for a .tmp file with your document name.
    – harrymc
    Nov 2, 2019 at 15:23
  • @harrymc I did 'echo $TMPDIR' in Terminal to find out that there is a folder of temporary files in '/var/folders/2j/yblh2kzx2jg0bhqkbx90z0d00000gn/T/com.microsoft.Word', but it had no data, only a few images. Searching the Mac for tmp yields nothing (including hidden files).
    – Fiksdal
    Nov 2, 2019 at 15:35

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