I have heard of people losing long word documents during power failures or could not recover documents due the lack of knowledge about Office auto recovery options. Personally, I had one or two incidents with older versions of Microsoft’s Word. This can happen to you and no matter how keen you are on data backups if your Office Word or Excel settings are incorrect or you have no idea how these are configured!
In my opinion, Word and Excel general parameters are somewhat tricky to find in the new versions of Microsoft’s Office. The tricky part is that you normally miss the tab Word options when clicking the Office button as your attention is on other parts of the menu window! I would not consider this location for such an important feature during an application usability exercise!
To access the application options, in this case Word Options start Microsoft Office Word and click the Office Button: 
On the bottom right-hand side of the Office menu click Word Options
Click Save from the Word Options window to view the autorecover options
- Make sure that the Save AutoRecover information every… minutes is checked and set a reasonable value in the minutes box
- Take a note of the AutoRecover file location or set a new location, which is easier to find or remember
- In addition, you can set the Default file location for new documents
