To minimize the possibility of losing your work during a crash, here’s how to set your Microsoft Office documents to autosave every minute. This is a very fast save interval, but it will create an almost seamless backup history of your documents. This ensures that the most information you will ever lose in the event of a crash will be whatever you completed over the course of the last minute.

For Mac:

1. In Word, go up and click the File menu item at the top of the screen > Preferences. From within this window, click Save.
2. From here, make sure the “Save AutoRecover info” box is checked. The default number of minutes set in this box will be 10, so if you want to greatly increase your coverage in the case of a system failure, you can lower this to one minute.

Now, the only warning about putting your save interval that low is that it may make your system slow down. If you notice your system slowing down after this change, increase it incrementally until you find a happy compromise between protection and performance.

For Windows:

1. In Word, go to the File menu > Options > Save. From there, you’ll adjust the settings the same way we did in the Mac version.

Finally, remember that you can save your document at any time by either pressing Command+S on a Mac or Ctrl+S on Windows. You can also save any time by clicking on the disk icon at the top of your window. This is always the most reliable way to make sure your work is preserved.

Click here to watch this video on YouTube.