Word Autorecovery & Work Files - safe to delete?

[Shawn Devlin]

My Microsoft User Data folder (in my home folder/Documents/) contains tons
of Autorecovery Files (eg., "Autorecovery Save of Exercise Journal.doc,"
"Autorecovery Save of Budget.doc," etc.) These are files I haven't modified
for several months or even since last year.

In addition, there are also lots of Word Work Files with more cryptic names
like "Word Work File A_5," "Word Work File A_1496285709," etc.

Can I safely delete these files?

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Answered "Yes" on the Office newsgroup.

 

[Elliott Roper]

My Microsoft User Data folder (in my home folder/Documents/) contains tons
of Autorecovery Files (eg., "Autorecovery Save of Exercise Journal.doc,"
"Autorecovery Save of Budget.doc," etc.) These are files I haven't modified
for several months or even since last year.

In addition, there are also lots of Word Work Files with more cryptic names
like "Word Work File A_5," "Word Work File A_1496285709," etc.

Can I safely delete these files?

Sure, you can lose 'em. Indeed they should not be there at all. They
should get cleaned up as you save the real files and when you quit
Word. Possibly some might be lying around as road kill after a crash of
Word in the distant past.

If they keep coming back, ask again. You might need to toggle prefs
like fast save and autorecover, but I'm not too sure about those. I
have fast save off and autorecover info set to 10 minutes and I never
get any leftovers.