Why did my writing on Word disappear after reconnecting to the internet?

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1

I’m looking for some help on this. Recently, I caused a friend to lose over an hour’s worth of writing. They were editing a Word document without an internet connection, and they didn’t have any offline editing settings active. Somehow, they were still able to write and make changes. I then used the keyboard command Ctrl+Z to undo a mistake, and the system froze for a moment before reconnecting to the internet. When it reconnected, it seemed like everything was lost, and the document reverted to an earlier version. The changes didn’t show up in the document’s version history or OneDrive. I checked system logs and network reconnection times, but I’m still confused. Is it possible that the writing got erased because of the internet reconnecting? Can I recover it?

2

I’m not sure what happened, but Microsoft Word does let you work offline. You don’t need to be online all the time to create or edit documents. So I don’t think it was the lack of an internet connection causing the issue. Where was the document saved?

3

@Arielle
The offline editing feature wasn’t on when they were editing. The document was saved in Microsoft Word, but I’m still unable to recover any progress.

4

Amir said:
@Arielle
The offline editing feature wasn’t on when they were editing. The document was saved in Microsoft Word, but I’m still unable to recover any progress.

I mean, was the file saved to a cloud server, or was it just stored locally on the PC?

5

@Arielle
No, I don’t think it was saved anywhere else that I know of.

6

Amir said:
@Arielle
No, I don’t think it was saved anywhere else that I know of.

So they opened Word, started typing, and didn’t save it at all? If that’s the case, the issue probably isn’t related to the internet connection. It would’ve used a temporary file saved on the local PC.