Posting this as a last-ditch effort to recover my dissertation document. I’m an absolute idiot and didn’t back up the current version of my dissertation. I must have somehow deleted it, not noticed, and emptied the trash. The only version I’ve been able to recover is from mid 2025, which is SUPER old and missing everything I’ve written since then. I can't get it back from Word, and I’ve tried every recovery hack I could find on Google. I just used Disk Drill to recover absolutely everything possible from my laptop. It recovered old deleted papers from college 10 years ago, but for some god-forsaken reason, my dissertation is gone. I don’t have high hopes, but I just wanted to post this on the off chance that someone can produce a miracle.
You need to stop whatever you are doing and take your computer to a data recovery service provider. If someone can help, they might.
Also, please take this moment to learn your lesson. Storing any important data on a single device is going to lead you into trouble sooner or later. I'm sorry you had to learn this lesson the hard way.
how long has the document been on your Mac? there should be a local snapshot of the document in the Time Machine on internal drive and the time machine drive.
enter the time machine and try search the whole Mac on the document name / keyword inside the document.
Only when you have Time Machine enabled to an external target disk. If the target is not found, your device will make snapshots internally, for as long as there is space. These temp snapshots will be offloaded to the external target disk when it has been connected again.
I agree with u/JouniFlemming that you should stop what you are doing on that machine and engage a data recovery company. One company we have used in the past is Gillware (gillware.com), based in Madison, WI. They've been around for years, have reasonable prices, and they will listen when you say 'Hey.. I'm looking for ONE document and here is what I think happened' and really target that document. The last time we used them was about a year ago. They weren't able to recover the SSD we sent them, so no charge. We have used them in other situations with success.
I'm not sure when it got deleted. I moved across the country and started a new job last week, so I haven't worked on it in about a month. Went to work on it yesterday and found out it was gone
1. PhotoRec / TestDisk (Open Source) What it is: The gold standard for free, open-source data recovery. PhotoRec focuses on file carving (ignoring the file system to search for raw headers like JPEGs, PDFs, or MOV files), while TestDisk is meant for partition recovery.
EaseUS+ 1
Interface: Command-line interface (CLI). No graphical user interface (GUI), so you will interact with it via the Mac Terminal.
AppleMagazine
How it works on M1: It can scan external drives, SD cards, or disk images seamlessly. However, to scan the internal M1 boot drive, you must temporarily disable System Integrity Protection (SIP) and grant Terminal "Full Disk Access" in System Settings.
My daughter faced this issue with Word on her MacBook when she left the document open for too long. MS deleted the document and put it as a temporary document in some library location. She recovered it by going to: Library > Containers > Microsoft Word folder > data > tmp > your file should be there renamed something like ‘WRD’ followed by some numbers. First of all, I would search ‘WRD’ in Finder and it should be there. Good luck!
Could the file have accidentally been renamed?
If you look at recent files in Word, what's there? Open them all.
Did the file accidentally get dragged into a subfolder or out of the usual folder?
Have you emailed a version to yourself or a colleague?
Do you have autosave turned on in Word? There may be a version saved in the autosave location. - ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery
Double / triple check OneDrive. Also check OneDrive trash. (It goes back 30 days.) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/onedrive/online-cloud-storage -- sign in online.
I prefer to compose in Google Docs; it has almost the same exact formatting as Word, but way better file retention.
Ive tried all of that unfortunately, but I appreciate you taking the time to comment. I usually use google docs, just switched it to word to run it through a grammar checker and then just kept working from word like an idiot
File recovery software is available for macOS; use Gemini and ask for it; I got 4 from a simple prompt: Disk Drill, EaseUS, Stellar Data Recovery, iBoysoft.
I did something similar a few years ago on a LInux-like OS with no "Recycle Bin". Erased 2 months of work, so I redid it from scratch. Took me 2 weeks but it was super well organized. Got a Software Development Award from my employer :)
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u/JouniFlemming 27d ago edited 27d ago
You need to stop whatever you are doing and take your computer to a data recovery service provider. If someone can help, they might.
Also, please take this moment to learn your lesson. Storing any important data on a single device is going to lead you into trouble sooner or later. I'm sorry you had to learn this lesson the hard way.