How do I recover an old version of an excel file?
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I spent an enormous amount of time working on multiple sheets in a single excel file. Now, it's gone and just has an old version. I'm not sure why it didn't get saved (I typically save things way more often than needed), but that's besides the point now.
- I'm on a Mac running version 16.61.1 of Excel and macOS Monterey 12.2.1
- Autosave was not on.
- I am willing to do anything to get this data back, including Disk Drill-esque methods.
- "Browse version history" is grayed out.
I'm asking this here because all of the solutions I've seen and tried only are doable on non-Mac computers. If there's any information I'm not remembering to include, I'm more than happy to give additional details.
Here is a list of things I've tried:
- Checked trash and the time machine.
- Checked temporary files: it looks like there's a newer temporary file instead that is too small in size to be my sheets. (New temporary files appear not to overwrite new ones in Excel 365, though.)
- Tried the solutions here (I'm on version 16.61.1 of Excel and macOS Monterey 12.2.1, so these menus don't exist on my version.)
Similarly, I don't appear to have the correct version to do this
because I have Excel 365.
- Attempted to find any "previous versions" by opening the properties/get info page of the file.
- I searched for .tmp files in Finder, but didn't see any of those files.
- I have installed EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard, and it is loading: I will try searching for .tmp files within it.
- I've tried solutions like this that don't work on macOS and Excel 365.
- I've tried finding "Unsaved Workbooks/Manage Workbook," which doesn't seem to exist on Excel 365.
Not much time has elapsed since the creation of the file I want to recover, I have barely used Excel since (just for troubleshooting), and I have 177 GB of unused storage on my computer.
I've found a ~ar4014.xar XAR archive document here:
"/Users/user/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Excel/Data/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/~ar4014.xar"
. The file is 25 KB, which is about what's expected for the file I'm trying to recover. It has the correct number of sheets: there are files within the .xar that say "sheet2.bin", "binaryIndex3.bin", "sheet6.bin.rels", etc. The data is definitely in the .bin files within the .xar file: I can see the correct English text in the .bin when I converted .bin to ASCII.
Asked by BigMistake
(131 rep)
Apr 28, 2023, 10:42 AM
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