One of the most frequent terrors when we make documents with the Office suite is the loss of all the work done up to that moment due to a sudden power blackout or to a Windows error, with a forced restart. These scenarios are less and less frequent, but we can protect the work done by programming Word, Excel and PowerPoint to automatically save the document while we are still making it: by acting in this way, in the worst case, we will only lose the last few moments before the problem or blackout. In this guide we will then show you how to activate automatic file saving on Word, Excel and PowerPoint, so as to always protect the work done in the office or at home; if this is not enough (we are at risk of file corruption), we will also show you how to use the file history to be able to restore an old revision of the file, so you can always start over at a good point and avoid having to start all over again.
READ ALSO -> Recover damaged, corrupt or lost Word documents and Excel files
1) Automatic saving to Office 365
If we have a subscription copy of Office 365, automatic saving is available by uploading the file directly to OneDrive, OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online (for companies): in this way the various Office programs used will synchronize every change made on the files (in intervals of a few seconds), so you never have to worry about problems. First, therefore, we enable the OneDrive client on our PC with Windows 10, looking for its icon in the lower right corner or looking for the OneDrive item in the Start menu.
If we have previous versions of Windows or use a Mac, we download OneDrive.
Once the synchronized OneDrive folder has been enabled, let's go to the Office program to be used, start writing the document ( New ) then click on File -> Save at the top and select OneDrive -> Personal folder as the path. The file will be immediately saved to the cloud and, in the upper part of the window, we will see the Auto save button appear.
In another article the guide to synchronize folders in Onedrive.
With the button active, we will no longer have to worry about saving at time intervals, since everything is synchronized with the cloud (obviously there must be an Internet connection). If we want to restore an old version of the file, simply click on the button saved in OneDrive at the top right and use the View all versions menu.
In this way we can automatically save and restore if necessary even in case of problems with the PC (we can always continue the work on another PC configured with our Office 365 account).
If we don't have Office 365 yet, we can sign up for a service subscription from here -> Buy Office 365.
A 1-month trial is also available for the basic package, so that you can evaluate all the advantages of having an Office subscription instead of buying the entire suite for offline production.
2) Automatic saving on offline versions of Office
If we don't have Office 365 but a free sale version (with the classic license of indefinite validity) the automatic saving on the cloud is not available, but we can always adopt the automatic saving for offline files .
In this case we will use the revision system integrated within Office, so we can save changes that we do not save manually at shorter intervals (we remind you that you just need to press CTRL + B on the keyboard to immediately save the progress made).
To enable automatic saving on retail versions of Office, open any document with the Office programs, click on File at the top and go to the Options -> Save path.
From this window we make sure that the extension of the most recent office files is indicated (for example docx, xlsx etc), we put the check mark under Save auto-save information every, we set 1 minute interval (the minimum that we can set) and we also enable the item Keep the latest version automatically restored if it closes without saving .
The autosave information will be saved in the path indicated in the Autosave file path field, which can also be a folder of any cloud (if we have synchronized OneDrive or Google Drive, we can point the changes there and thus have a continuous backup).
To restore files after a blackout or a system error, simply open Office again and use the file recovery tool, which will draw from the backup we configured earlier. Unfortunately, this system only saves the changes made every minute: if we are very fast in writing, a missing minute can blow up a lot of document at the time of recovery.
3) How to use Windows File History
If we want an additional backup system, so that we can also recover files damaged by errors, sudden reboots or malware, we can rely on the rescue system called File History, present on Windows 10 (but also on previous versions of the operating system ).
To activate File History on Windows, open the Start menu at the bottom left, search for Backup settings and open the first item that will appear at the top; from the new menu we set a backup drive (a USB stick, an external hard disk or any network resource) by clicking on Add a drive .
After adding the backup path, we click More Options, select Every 10 minutes in the Back up files menu and finally add the backup folder (where we saved the Office files) by clicking on the Add a folder button.
The system will automatically backup every 10 minutes, so you always have a copy of our Office documents on a separate disk. To learn more about the backup systems, we invite you to read the guide below.
READ ALSO -> Backup user folders to save personal data in Windows
