Please help? I need to restore a previous saved version of a Word doc

[tennisneal]

I'm using Word for Mac 2011 on OS X 10.8.5

I saved a newer version of Chapter 9 (of my novel), which wrote over & revised the older version in the process. The older version is what I need to restore, written on 5/17/14.

It's not backed up on Time Machine or elsewhere. Is there a way to retrieve and restore previous saved versions of this file?

 

[Tumbleweed666]

No. If there was, there wouldn't be a need for Time Machine or backups.

 

[jamietshaw]

Probably not. Microsoft Word used to have a versioning feature but they removed it because it caused too many problems. OS X has version control built in but the big companies like Microsoft and Adobe don’t make use of it (look at TextEdit for an example).

I guess there’s chance that the new version wasn’t actually stored at the same physical location as the old one on the disk (even if it appears so in the Finder), and so your old version is invisibly still available, but don’t be too hopeful. You’d need some specialist disk recovery software (probably not free) to find out.