Jeromy Anglim's Notes

Assorted notes on statistics, R, psychological research, LaTeX, computing, etc. See also my primary blog for more substantive posts: jeromyanglim.blogspot.com
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  • How to find Word auto recovery files in OSX?

    I’ve recently had the experience where Word on OSX has crashed. I’m used to the auto-recovery file then being reopened on startup. However, instead, only the previously saved version is opened. This led me on a search to try to find the auto-recovery file that is automatically saved.

    In general OSX and Word don’t make it easy to find. Specifically, if your user name was fred for example, the files tend to be located in:

    /Users/fred/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/Office 2011 AutoRecovery
    

    the trick is that Library is a hidden folder. Update: The simplest way to open the Library folder is to open Finder, hold down the alt key then click on the Go menu, and then click on Library. The Library menu option is only shown while you hold down the alt key. Once you’ve done that navigate to the relevant folder as shown above.

    Other options for navigating to the Library Folder

    I’ve since decided to unhide the Library folder using this tip from OSXDaily:

    Simply run this on the terminal:

     chflags nohidden ~/Library/
    

    If you don’t want to unhide the library folder, you can

    1. Open finder
    2. Go to the home directory
    3. Click Go and enter Library (go permits you to open hidden files if you know them by name)
    4. Navigate to the relevant folder

    As a side note, I found the location of the auto recovery files by running the following command from the terminal from the home directory.

    find * -iname 'autorec*'
    
    1. find is a tool for performing file searches recursively down directories
    2. * searches all files
    3. -iname means the command that follows is case insensitive
    4. autorec* means a file beginning with autorec followed by any other characters.

    A better option for auto-recovery of Word on OSX

    However, as an additional note, I’ve sometimes found that word files can become corrupted. In this case, it can be important to fix the cause of the problem. Opening and editing the corrupted file can just lead to data loss at a later stage.

    Finally, I found that I Word’s built-in auto-recovry corrupted my documents. As such I disabled the built-in auto-recovery and have set up an alternative auto-save that does a full auto save. See this post for a description of the process.

    • June 13, 2013 (6:25 pm)
    • 16 notes
    • #@osx
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