How to Efficiently Recover Temporary Excel Files in Windows 10

Why can't restore temporary excel worksheets from temp folder immediately?

"Hi, experts, how can I recover temporary excel files in Windows 10? It's totally a disaster for not saving the sheet you had put a lot of painful work into. I've searched all over the computer, by the way, I use Windows 10 operating system, literally found nothing but a folder containing many files named as ~xxx.tmp. I felt so excited then thinking that maybe this is the temporary copy of the lost file. To my disappointment, it is nothing but a useless garbage with several bytes. What should I do? If I can't recover XLS file from temp folder, will I still with the other chance?"

Do you know how Excel saves files? ~xxx.temp file, also the temporary file, is created while you're editing an excel worksheet before successfully saving it.

Where are temporary excel files stored?

As we all know that Microsoft Office has an AutoRecovery feature that it will save the Excel file, Word document etc files into a temporary folder in Windows PC every a few minutes. The only thing that you need to do is to turn on the AutoSave feature in Office Excel or Word, PPT apps.

Excel will automatically save every 10 minutes (or 5 minutes as your set) to the default location: C:\Users\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles'.

How to restore lost Excel from temporary files in Windows 10?

Once the file you worked on is saved, the temporary will disappear. If not, you probably can restore data from the temp files.

However, it's not a 100% viable solution for deleted or lost excel file recovery. For a complicated case, the .xls file recovery requires professional knowledge of command line, which sounds incredible for average Microsoft Office users. In this case, we suggest you ask for help from a reliable and powerful data recovery software.

Now that you can follow below two methods and try to restore lost excel temporary files in Windows 10 with ease now:

Method 1. Lost excel temporary file recovery in Windows 10

Step 1. Find lost excel temp files in temp file folder: C:\Users\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles

If you are a Windows 7 or XP user, follow this path: C:\Users\name\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Excel\

Step 2. Restore Excel temporary files:

Find excel temporary files begin with "$" or "~" and end with ".TMP" > Copy and save them to another safe location > Change the extension from .TMP to .XLS or .XLSX.

Method 2. Lost or deleted excel file recovery software for Windows 10

The advantage of using a third-party recovery tool is obvious, especially for common people with little technical background. For example, EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard is such a wizard-like program, the recovery procedure is controlled in just three simple steps. Most importantly, the file recovery software can recover almost all types of document files including DOC/DOCX, XLS/XLSX, PPT/PPTX, PDF, CWK, HTML/HTM, INDD, EPS, etc.

Step1. Select the disk where the excel files located and click "Scan" button.

Step2. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard will start a quick scan first. After the quick scan completes, a deep scan will automatically launch in order to find more files.

Step3. After the scan, you can preview all the listed recoverable document files and choose the lost excel files you want to recover.