How to recover/restore Word Doc to Before Rejecting Changes

Question

Hi,

I've been writing a document for over a year. Unfortunately, the Tracking was on, and I don't even know how that happened. It must have been accidentally. So every time I open that doc, I had to click on "no mark up, " which annoyed me. I spent hours reading articles online to learn how to stop it completely, and after reading several options that didn't work, I ended up deleting or rejecting the changes (I don't recall which). As you can imagine, the document is a mess. Sentences are mixed up, words are attached to others, and many paragraphs don't make sense. It's hard to explain how I'm feeling right now. Is there a way I could restore the document to the version before delete/reject? I have tried everything, including reviewing history. I clicked the the version I had before the the change and still didn't work. Please and thank you!

Answer 1

Hi @Claudia Cisterna

The only official way to restore previous versions is to use:

View previous versions of Office files

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/view-previous-versions-of-office-files-5c1e076f-a9c9-41b8-8ace-f77b9642e2c2

An alternative is to use data recovery backup software, but there is no guarantee that will work either.

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If this is helpful please accept answer.

Answer 2

Hi @Claudia Cisterna ,
Do you enable the backup features in Word?
I suggest you refer to this support article about "How to recover unsaved Word documents":
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/word/recover-lost-unsaved-corrupted-document

In my opinion, if these methods don't help you get your documents back, I suggest you save your backup habits regularly.

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