I was working in Word when it crashed and only presented me with the options to restart the program or close the program.
I closed the program and checked the document to see the last save time had been an hour or so earlier. When I opened the file, the “recovered document” options were not available and I could see the last hour’s work was not there.
I began to search for a solution which I found in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316951 “How to recover a lost Word document.”
There were several recommendations which I tried in sequence with no success. Finally I came down to the suggestion to search my entire hard drive for *.asd files. I did this and found several files, one was my a copy of my crashed document. I opened the *.asd file with word and found all my information in place with nothing lost. [more]
By the way the file was located in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word, which is the default location Word uses to store all “AutoRecover” files. And also by default on my computer, Word was set to autosave every 10 minutes and was set to keep the last autosaved version if Word is closed without saving.
Searching your entire drive for *.asd files, is a good idea if, for some reason, the default settings have been changed and as a result, you don’t know where the *.asd files might be saved.
You can double check the AutoRecover and Autosave settings in Word 2010 by going to Files>Options>Save. These features are also available in Excel and Powerpoint. The AutoRecover file locations are different for each application, but are easy to find by looking in the appropriate folders.