Recover an Excel File
Which route works depends on how the file was lost, and one of the four cases has no answer inside Excel at all: a workbook you saved over. Crashing or closing before a save is the recoverable one, and what comes back is an AutoRecover snapshot rather than your file — the interval is 10 minutes out of the box, so up to ten minutes of work was never committed to disk anywhere and nothing will return it. Drafts of workbooks that were never saved sit in %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles for four days and are then cleared. For anything overwritten or deleted the answer lies outside Excel: version history on OneDrive or SharePoint, the Recycle Bin, or a backup.
The formula
%AppData%\Microsoft\Excel\the AutoRecover file location, for workbooks that already have a file%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFilesdrafts of never-saved workbooks; kept four days, then deletedFile > Info > Manage Workbook > Recover Unsaved Workbooksopens that UnsavedFiles folder from inside ExcelFile > Info > Version Historyearlier saved versions — OneDrive and SharePoint files onlyFile > Options > Savethe AutoRecover interval, and the keep-on-close tickbox~$Budget.xlsxNOT a recovery copy: the lock file recording who has it openA worked example
Excel crashed at 16:32 on a workbook last saved by hand at 15:50. AutoRecover is on its default 10-minute interval and the file lives in a local Documents folder, not OneDrive.
Reopen Excel > Document Recovery pane > open the entry labelled (AutoRecovered) > File > Save As, under a new name
The recovered copy holds everything up to the last snapshot, roughly 16:30 — the final two minutes of edits are gone and nothing on the machine has them. Save As rather than Save is deliberate: opening the recovered version and pressing Ctrl+S writes it over the 15:50 file, so if the snapshot turns out to be the poorer of the two you have just destroyed the better one. Keep both until you have compared them.
Which one do I need?
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between AutoSave and AutoRecover?
AutoSave writes every keystroke straight into the real file and exists only for workbooks stored on OneDrive or SharePoint in Microsoft 365; it is what builds the version history. AutoRecover keeps a periodic snapshot in a temporary folder and surfaces only after an abnormal close, on any file anywhere. Neither protects you from deliberately saving a bad edit over a good file — with AutoSave on, that damage is written to the cloud copy immediately, and version history is the only way back.
How much work does AutoRecover actually save?
Everything up to its last snapshot and not one second more. The interval is 10 minutes out of the box (File > Options > Save), so a crash can cost ten minutes of edits that were never written anywhere and cannot be reconstructed. Lowering it to 1 or 2 minutes costs nothing noticeable on an ordinary workbook, and it is the one change worth making before you need it rather than after.
I closed without saving and clicked Don't Save — is it gone?
Not necessarily. If "Keep the last AutoRecovered version if I close without saving" was ticked in File > Options > Save, the final snapshot is listed under File > Info > Manage Workbook for a workbook that had been saved at least once before, and a never-saved draft waits in the UnsavedFiles folder for four days. If that box was clear, the copy was discarded as the file closed and there is nothing left to open.
Is the ~$ file next to my workbook a backup I can open?
No. A file named ~$Budget.xlsx is an owner or lock file, a few hundred bytes recording who currently has Budget.xlsx open so a second person gets the read-only prompt. It contains none of your data. If Excel crashed it can be left behind and then wrongly reports the file as in use; deleting it once Excel is fully closed is safe, and it does nothing for recovery either way.
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