I need help recovering some important Excel files that I accidentally closed without saving. I'm using a Windows 11 laptop, and I'm not the administrator since it's a work computer. Yesterday, I was working on an Excel file from my downloads folder and spent about an hour taking notes before realizing I hadn't saved it.
I've checked the standard recovery locations, like the appdata folders, but I can't find the unsaved files. I did find some temporary files in the temp directory that were created during that time. I tried renaming them to .XLSX, but Excel still won't open them. If anyone has suggestions for recovering these lost files, I would really appreciate it! I'm under a lot of pressure at work and need to get this sorted out.
3 Answers
If it's a work device, your company's servers might keep backups every few hours. It's worth contacting your IT department to check if they can restore that temp file for you. I've had that work for me in the past, so it's definitely worth a shot! Good luck!
You might want to try this: Open Excel and go to File > Info > Manage Workbook > Recover Unsaved Workbooks. If that doesn't work, try copying those .tmp files to a different location, then open Excel and drag and drop them into the application to see if it helps with recovery. You could also use 7-Zip to open the .tmp files as archives; sometimes you can salvage data that way.
Thanks for the tip! I tried the first method but it didn’t work for me. Can you explain how to drag and drop those .tmp files into Excel?
If you closed the file without saving, unfortunately, the temp files are usually cleared when the application closes by default. Excel might prompt you if it crashed and has recovered files. Also, you should consider using cloud services like OneDrive or SharePoint in the future; they often have auto-save enabled which can prevent this kind of issue.
That's good to know! I didn’t realize that corporate servers did backups. I’ll reach out to IT tomorrow.