Forum Discussion
File recovery
Hi everyone,
I worked on my dashboard all day last Friday and forgot to save...
Today my laptops battery died and I only have the old version.
Does anyone have any suggestion for recovering the dashboard? I would appreciate all suggestions a lot!
Tim Gabriel
That hurts. Normal Office applications have the autosave functionality. You could try going that route and see if you get lucky, but I don't see anything that indicates Power BI has this feature yet.
I do see other people wanting to see autosave become a feature though. You can add votes to the idea. I think I'll do the same. Autosave is one of those things you don't think about until you lose work without it.
9 Replies
Hello,
I know this post is abit old but I somehow stumble across this issue now and again.
Pop this into your file location
C:\Users\----your user name ----\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Power BI Desktop\TempSaves\
This brings up everything you have not saved.
🤗
That hurts. Normal Office applications have the autosave functionality. You could try going that route and see if you get lucky, but I don't see anything that indicates Power BI has this feature yet.
I do see other people wanting to see autosave become a feature though. You can add votes to the idea. I think I'll do the same. Autosave is one of those things you don't think about until you lose work without it.
Yupp, it is a painful "lesson learnt" moment.
As I was not able to find any kind of solution and I have reconstructed my old dashboard by now I will mark your reply as a solution so that eventual visitor vote for the idea as well.
Good Morning All,
I spent an hour this morning trying to figure how to resolve this issue. Option A (below) did not work for me because I accidently deleted the recovery file.
Option A: (most common resolution)
- Open Power BI Desktop instead of double-clicking the the corrupted pbix file's location
- Click File -> Open -> Select the corrupted pbix file
- You will see a yellow ribbon saying “open in autorecovery mode..” Click on it and the file will open with the version before it got corrupted.
Option B:
- Open another pbix file on your computer.
- a) If file does not open properly, uninstall PowerBI Desktop and reinstall
- b) If file does open, proceed to Option C
Option C:
- Open file explorer
- Locate the corrupted pbix file's location
- Right click the file -> click "Restore previous version"
- Select your version (typically, most recent), and open.
- Do what you need and overwrite the file in its original location.
Restore Previous VersionsChoose Previous version and restore
For me, in 2025, with Power BI that was installed through the Microsoft Store app, it is located in c:\Users\ ...my username... \Microsoft\Power BI Desktop StoreApp\AutoRecovery
There is also a "TempSaves" folder - I'm not sure what makes something go to TempSave vs AutoRecovery.
