How to enable Microsoft Word to autosave your document every minute (tutorial)

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I recently got a call from my friend who was freaking out about losing her entire final paper for law school. She forgot to save her paper after writing a couple of pages and her computer crashed. It’s a situation that every college student faces at one point in their life. You know that you’re supposed to save your work frequently, but it is easy to forget especially when you’re in the zone. Luckily, I was able to help her out and recover her unsaved Microsoft Word document. By default, Microsoft Word autosaves your document every 10 minutes. However, you can lose a good amount of work in ten minutes. Here is a tutorial on how to enable Microsoft Word to autosave your document every minute.

Windows

  1. Open Microsoft Word
  2. Go to File
  3. Go to Options
  4. Go to Save
  5. Under “Save AutoRecover information every ____ minutes”, change the number to one. It should be set to 10 minutes by default.

Mac

  1. Open Microsoft Word
  2. Go to File
  3. Go to Preferences
  4. Go to Save
  5. Make sure “Save AutoRecover info” is checked. Set minutes box to one minute.

This will allow Microsoft Word to autosave your document every minute. If your computer crashes for whatever reason, the most you will lose is up to the last minute of your work. The AutoRecover files are saved as .asd files. It isn’t obvious where Microsoft Word stores these .asd files. You can see the file path by looking at “AutoRecover file location:” located two lines below where you adjust the minutes to autosave. It may be a good idea to move the AutoRecover files to a location that is easier for you to find and access. This is done by clicking browse and choosing the location of where you want that file to be located.

Example of how AutoRecover files look like

Knowing how the AutoRecover function works will save you a panic attack in case your computer crashes. Another great option is to use Google Docs to write your paper instead. Google Docs automatically saves your work and it is backed up to your Google Drive in the cloud. This means that even if your hardware is completely destroyed, you’ll still have access to your file from any computer.