Does Word automatically assign a different file name each time it is saved subsequently?

Answer 1

Autosave/Autorecover BehaviorMicrosoft Word's behavior with regard to Autosave/Autorecovery files has changed throughout different versions of the program. All versions, however, save a single instance of the Autosave file and overwrite that file at each Autosave interval. Word does not save incremental versions of the file at each Autosave interval.

Note that, in most versions of Word, the Autosave file may be an older version than the latest manually saved version, since the Autosave file is not written again during a manual save.

For example, if Autosave is set to 10 minute intervals and last saved at 5:05PM, the document you manually save at 5:13 will be the newest document. If your system crashes at 5:14, Word will attempt to Autorecover the 5:05 version, since that's the most recent Autosave version. If you allow this to occur and then save as the original file name, you will be overwriting the changes made between 5:05 and 5:13.

Microsoft is careful to point out that Autosave is not a substitute for the Save command. It is designed to allow recovery of a document in progress in the event of a catastrophic application or OS fault.

Autosave File LocationsOn a Windows machine, the default location for Autosave files is in one of the following two locations:

1. "C:\ Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Microsoft\Word".
2. "C:\ Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Temp"

The file extension is .asd, Newer versions of word will convert this to a .wbk document upon Autorecovery.

On a Macintosh under OS X, Word 2008 defaults to saving Autosave files here:

• /Library/Application Support/Microsoft/autosave

Note that this is not in the user's library, but rather in the main system Library. Yes that is a little odd, but it's Microsoft. The location can be changed using the File Locations settings menu.

RecoveryAfter a system crash it is a good practice to manually archive copies of both the last manually saved version and the last Autosaved version for comparison during recovery.