Problem with Autorecover feature for Microsoft 365 for Mac

You appear to want to use Autorecover as a substitute for Autosave (because you don't want to use OneDrive). It doesn't work that way.

Autorecover is a transient process (and autorecover files are transient files that are not .docx files) that exist only while Word & your doc are open so that after an app or system crash Word can attempt to recover the docs. And I mean attempt because there is no guarantee of actual recovery.

The MS documentation is wrong. Word's autorecover location is not /Users/<username>/Library/Containers/com.Microsoft/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery. It is /Users/<username>/Library/Containers/Microsoft Word/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery Nothing will appear there unless & until a Word document has been open at least 10 minutes; and Autorecover file(s) are deleted when you close Word or the doc regardless of with or without saving.

You should make it a normal practice to manually Save your documents as you edit if you want to keep them local. If you want Autosave you have to use OneDrive.

Eugene user wrote:

But neither the folder nor the file is where they say it should be.

My autorecover folder is (for username = steve)

/Users/steve/Library/Containers/Microsoft Word/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery

But the files saved there are not Word documents (.docx). There are in some other internal format that MS-Word uses to try to recover changes made but not saved, when Word unexpectedly exits. The way auto recovery works is you open the file that had unsaved changes when MS-Word exited and Word immediately asks if you wish to try to recover unsaved changes. My experience with this is that if I say "yes," it will recover all of the unsaved changes or maybe all except the last few changes. So my experience is that it does recover things fairly well, although not 100%.

I don't see how knowing where this folder is helps the user much because I don't think users can typically open the files in there, which are not actual Word format files, but rather a different type of file Microsoft uses to track incremental changes to a Word file. Powerpoint has something similar.

I know the difference between Autosave and Autorecover. I just don't want to save docs on the MS OneDrive, their cloud storage.

Distinguishing between the above autorecover function and periodically SAVING the file you are working on (to a .docx file), Microsoft allows for auto SAVING via OneDrive, its cloud storage. If you don't want to use Microsoft's cloud storage for this, you can certainly manually save periodically (see MartinR's post, they explain all this very well). I don't know of a way to AUTOSAVE in Word without using OneDrive but one can certainly manually save as frequently as necessary.

One other caveat: if you manually save MANY times while a file is open for editing, say dozens or hundreds of times, you can run into another problem of too many open files at once. So if you are manually saving A LOT, it helps to save and quit Word, then reopen it, now and then, to clear that out.

Autosave & Autorecover are different features.

Autosave (where your document is automatically saved every 10 minutes) only works with OneDrive.

Autorecover works on your Mac ... but it's there to protect your documents from an application or system crash, it is not a substitute for Autosave. The Autorecovery folder on a Mac is a hidden folder, so you won't see it if you look for it in the Finder. And the files there are not intended to be used except in the event of an application or system crash.

If you don't want to use OneDrive you will need to save your documents manually from time to time. It's a good idea to do that anyway.