Microsoft Excel Autobackup

Martin Brinkmann
Sep 3, 2008
Updated • Feb 24, 2013
Microsoft, Microsoft Office
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Excel Autobackup is an Microsoft Excel add-in which adds automatic backup capabilities to Excel. The default autosave in Excel is overwriting previous versions of the spreadsheet without asking the user if that is what he wants.

The Excel add-in provides automatic backups of Excel spreadsheets that do not interfere with previous backups. The interval of each automatic backup, the destination folder, the days the backups will be kept and the maximum number of backups can be defined when the add-in is loaded and activated in Microsoft Excel.

Unlike autosave, autobackup will never prompt you to save files, or replace your original files without asking.

Instead it will automatically save your files to a folder specified by you, at a time interval you define. You will also be able to define how many backup copies you want to keep.

The Excel Autobackup add-in has to be activated before it can be used. To do that a user would have to click on the Office ribbon and select Excel Options at the bottom of the menu. There he would click on the Add-ins menu entry on the left side and the button Go at the bottom the the add-ins menu once it is displayed.

This opens a list of available add-ins and a browse button among others on the right side. The user would then click on Browse and select the autobackup.xla file on the computer's hard drive. This loads and activates the plugin. After clicking OK in the menu the previously described settings can be changed and the add-in will start to automatically backup Excel spreadsheets right away.

The backup will be named after the original filename with an additional number to differentiate the backups.

Update: Excel Auto Backup seems to be only compatible with Office Excel 2007 and earlier, and not with newer versions of Excel.

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Comments

  1. Medhelpsis said on March 12, 2020 at 5:57 am
    Reply

    This backup folder is used by WPS Office to save data in case the application experiences a crash. Should that happen, the application will use the data found in that folder for file recovery. But what does this have to do with the cloud? Simple. I’m going to show you how you can easily migrate that backup folder from the local drive to a cloud sync’d drive. Say you have Dropbox installed on multiple systems and you want to share your WPS Office backups folder so that each machine syncs to the same backup location. With WPS this is not only possible, but simple.

  2. Jim Foote said on December 16, 2018 at 3:02 pm
    Reply

    I am currently using AutoBackup.xla with Office 2007, 2013, and 2016 (365) and it works fine for me. The only limitation is that the Excel file needs to be saved with an xlsm extension, which I don’t view as a problem at all.

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