An Unexpected Error has Occurred - Autorecover has been disabled for this session of Excel

[magemaester]

Hi everyone,

I built quite a large Excel model (280mb) as part of a company project. The model due to its size was a little cumbersome and slow to work with, but it worked well for its purpose. However one time it crashed, and when I reopened Excel after that instance, the error message "An unexpected Error has occurred - autorecover has been disabled for this session of Excel' occurred. As soon as that error occurred, I could no longer save the workbook. It didn't matter if I closed the workbook and reopened it again, I was no longer able to save it.

I thought the workbook must have been corrupted. But to my surprise, not only could my colleagues open that notebook and save it without a hitch, but also I could workaround this error if I got my colleagues to 'Save As' the workbook in a different name, and work on that one instead. This meant that whenever the workbook became un-saveable on my own laptop, I just had to ask a colleague to save the file in a different name, which would make that workbook capable of being saved on my own laptop. But it was only a matter of time (i.e. a few days) before the 'An Unexpected Error has Occurred....' error showed up again - which meant I had to ask my colleagues to create another duplicate workbook using 'Save As'... and so forth.

So my immediate conclusion was that this error only pertained to this huge model that I was building, and so I wasn't too fussed about it because it was only 1 file. But recently I discovered that, ever since that incident, the "Autorecover has been disabled..." message would occasionally come back to haunt other excel files that I open (which were completely fine before this whole incident). But now, even opening relatively small files, I could sometimes get this error out of nowhere (although this time around it didn't affect my ability to save the file).

I've tried googling and looking up this error... but everyone seems to have a different problem to mine. Does anyone have an idea what's causing this? Its quite annoying and I feel like this a computer-specific issue (since my colleagues have no issue using any of the workbooks that I couldn't), rather than any of my workbooks being corrupted...

 

[mole999]

is excel holding damaged temp files, see it with word using tilde as something that appears open but isn't, maybe these are what are causing you to crash when others fly

 

[ColinBurrows]

I have exactly the same problem - and it's occurred sporadically over numerous years. Symptom: seemingly randomly informs me that Autorecover has been disabled, after which my only choice is to close the workbook without saving. And I'm NOT on a network, the workbook is NOT shared, and the file is stored on my hard drive (which has >200GB unused space). And I'm using Excel 365. I, too, have searched in vain for a solution.

 

[Marc L]

​

As Excel must load everything in memory but not well manages it so a crash can raise at any time !​

Avoid using ActiveX objects, big UserForms, huge ranges with conditional formatting, …​

So you must save some backup for important workbooks as you must do not trust the Excel autorecover feature​

'cause even when it is enable it may not recover anything after a crash.​

 

[ColinBurrows]

Thanks for the response. I always save numerous times, maybe every 10 minutes or so. I don't use ActiveX objects, nor UserForms. Very occasionally conditional formatting, but only on very small ranges. It's been happening on and off for probably the last 10 years, with different computers and different versions of Excel. And in all that time I've never been able to figure out any kind of pattern as to what causes it. The setting "send info to Microsoft to allow us to improve our product" (or however it's worded) I've always said yes. But I guess it's not something they can figure out from whatever information gets sent to them. Thanks again for replying though.

 

[Marc L]

As Excel needs a lot of memory (RAM) the better is to launch it alone as possible​

so do not open too many other applications in particular on basic computer with the lower RAM level.​

Some VBA procedures which do not release objects variables may not help …​

​

 

[ColinBurrows]

Thanks, Marc. I have 16 GB of RAM, and almost always have just one file open at a time. It doesn't seem in any way related to VBA, but I do set object variables = Nothing when I've finished with them.

 

[Marc L]

Memory seems to be better managed under Excel 64 bits rather than on 32 bits version which is limited to 2 or 4 Gb depending on version …​

 

[ColinBurrows]

Good point. I've been 64 bit for quite a while. Since the initial message relates to Autorecover, I might try switching it off and see if it happens. One "problem" (kind of) is that it happens infrequently, so that makes it harder to troubleshoot. If I learn anything helpful I'll post it here. Thanks.

 

[ColinBurrows]

Thanks for responding, and thanks for the very generous offer of your time. The problem is that it happens randomly and can happen with seemingly any workbook. So there isn't a workbook that I could give you to help troubleshoot.
magemaester's original post is interesting, in that they found that a colleague could open the file fine. So that's consistent with it not being a problem caused by the workbook per se.
As I say, I've known about the problem for 10 years or so, and several people that I've worked with over the years know about it. Given which, Microsoft must know about it but they, too, haven't figured it out. I think it must be related to memory somehow, where some combination of events over time causes the problem.
I've never figured out how much of a clue the "autorecover has been disabled" gives us. It may mean nothing, in that the "unexpected error" piece suggests it's just a catch-all error message.
If I ever get more information I'll post it here. But it could be a while.