Mac Forum / Applications / Word / April 2008

Assuming you closed Word in the mean time, you're probably out of luck
without investing in a disk recovery utility (and perhaps even then). If
you haven't, you *might* be able to force quit and recover something
(but undoubtedly not all) from saved work files - but it's a long shot.

Of course, there's the obligatory comment about "you should use your
backup copy". One way to do that automatically is to save your templates
(including Normal) by setting the Options/Always save backup copy
checkbox in the Save As dialog. All your subsequent docs will then
retain that property.

OTOH, that only saves the last two copies, so if you save the wrong one
twice, you're hosed.