How to recover a .tmp file that converted English to Chinese characters and nonsense

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I'm was working on Word docx 2011, computer suddenly restarted (Sierra, 10.12.6 ) and I lost 5 hours of important work on the saved document, even though I have auto-save on for every 10min.

I found a few versions of it in .tmp files, but only a bit the first part of it was in English when I opened it in TextEdit. The rest of the document was in chinese characters and questions markets. I'm assuming these characters are the rest of my text that I need to recover, but how??

Was I working on a corrupted file? I've never had this happen before, and I'm desperate to retrieve my work.

Help! Thanks!
 

Raz0rEdge

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Those are not Chinese characters but rather binary data that TextEdit is trying to interpret. TextEdit can only handle plain text and RTF style files. When Word senses that it has been closed unceremoniously, it should give you the option to recover your progress from those .TMP files (only it can read it properly). If you don't get that option, make copies of those .TMP files and rename the extension to be .DOCX instead and see if Word will open them for you..

For the future, even with auto-save enabled, you should get into the habit of hitting CMD+s to save your document frequently..
 

chscag

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Welcome to our forums.

I'm was working on Word docx 2011, computer suddenly restarted (Sierra, 10.12.6 ) and I lost 5 hours of important work on the saved document, even though I have auto-save on for every 10min.

I don't know how many times I have had to tell Mac Office users (2008 and 2011) that the auto save feature used in Word does not work when the computer crashes or restarts. You have to open Word preferences, Save, and select: "Always make a backup copy". That way you will not lose work that you have already made up to the point of the last edit and backup.

And advice above from Ashwin about using the command + s frequently should be followed.
 

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