

For me, it just makes sense to turn off the feature. This makes the backup file of minimal worth to me, since it only represents a version of my document that is five to seven minutes old. If I have automatic backups turned on, that means I am deleting the old backup file and creating a new one every five to seven minutes. Why? Consider my writing scenario: When working on a document, I typically save every five to seven minutes I have just trained myself to do that. If you save documents regularly, there may not be a need for automatic backups. This behavior of Word in regard to backup documents naturally brings up another point.

Set up auto recovery in excel for mac windows#
This type of backup generates a separate file that can be saved in a separate location.Īutomatic timed backups are intended to help if you forget to manually save the file and Word or Windows crashes. These days, the time it takes to make the backup is almost imperceptible. As a result, people tended to choose longer backup intervals. Years ago, when hard drives were small and slow and network connections were slow too, the pause while writing the backup file was quite noticeable. The interval you chose is a tradeoff between the momentary inconvenience when the file is locked while the backup is written to disk. You define an interval, say every 5 minutes, and Word saves the document for you at that interval. There is another type of automatic backup referred to as AutoRecover.

The result is that no matter how many times you save, there will only be two files, and they will always be in the same directory. When you again save the document, the existing WBK file is deleted, the existing document file is renamed to WBK, and the document is saved again. Since Word only does a rename to create the backup file, it is not possible to specify a different location for that file-both the document and its backup are stored in the same directory. This backup copy is nothing more than a copy of the file you opened, before you start editing it, renamed with a WBK extension.
