AutoSave, AutoRecover, and Manual Save explained in Office 2019 and 2021

Microsoft Office applications support a variety of options when saving documents. Users can save files manually, recover them using AutoRecover, or save them to the Microsoft cloud using the AutoSave feature.

AutoSave highlights in Word applications that support it. Starting in Office 2019, it appears in the upper left corner of the interface. A traditional save button appears on the side of the interface.

When you hover over an element in the Office interface, the tooltip "If you want to use autosave, save to OneDrive or SharePoint Online".

According to Microsoft, AutoSave is just a cloud-based storage solution. Office users need to have access to a personal or work OneDrive or SharePoint account to use this feature.

Home users using Office 2019 or 2021 can use this feature to automatically save their documents to the cloud using their OneDrive account. This feature is not available with other cloud providers or on-premises.

Office users who just want to save documents locally can avoid AutoSave and rely on manual saving of documents and the AutoRestore feature.

AutoRecover will periodically (at 10-minute intervals by default) save documents to the local system's cache. It can be used to recover documents if an Office application crashes or another situation occurs that causes a discrepancy between a locally saved copy of a document and its automatically restored version.

Microsoft Office users have several options to customize the saving experience on their devices. Select File > Settings > Save to display the preferences.

There you can change the following options:

• Disable "Automatically save OneDrive and SharePoint Online files by default" ” – This only affects files you open from online storage.
• Change the auto-recover interval by modifying the "Save auto-recover information every .. minutes" preference. LibreOffice supports the same functionality, but is turned off by default.
• Change the automatic recovery cache location. The default is C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\[OFFICEAPPFOLDER]
• Enable "Save to computer by default".
• Change the default save location for local files and personal templates.

According to Microsoft, there is no option to use AutoSave locally in Office 2019 or 2021:

AutoSave is not available when working with local files. The old autorecover behavior can still be used to periodically save copies of changed files to help minimize data loss in the event of unexpected situations such as crashes.

Autosaving can have many impacts on workflow, especially in a work environment. Microsoft published a huge list in a support article, here are the highlights:

• Editing existing files and saving them under new names (for example, when doing quarterly reporting) no longer works because existing files are automatically changed as well.
• Enable auto-save Any changes made to existing files will be saved, even if the user is present without clicking the save button, for example, when running What-If Changes.

Autosave can be disabled in Group Policy. You need to import the latest administrative templates for Microsoft 365 Apps to make changes. Note that this also applies to Office 2021, although it's not mentioned.

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