Microsoft Office Cleanup: Document Cache and AutoRecover Files That Pile Up for Years

What the Document Cache is, and why it can bloat

When Word, Excel or PowerPoint open a file stored on OneDrive or SharePoint, they don't work directly against the cloud — they edit a local copy staged in the Office Document Cache and sync changes in the background. That is why you can keep typing on a train, and why sync conflicts usually resolve themselves. The cache lives under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Office\16.0\OfficeFileCache, and on machines that live inside shared SharePoint libraries it can quietly grow to hundreds of megabytes.

The old way to manage it — the Microsoft Upload Center with its tray icon and its “files needing attention” list — was retired along with older Microsoft 365 builds, and the cache now takes care of itself far better than it used to. Stale entries still accumulate after years of upgrades and abandoned syncs, though, and the fix is unglamorous: close every Office app, delete the contents of the OfficeFileCache folder, and let Office rebuild it. If Office warns you about unsynced changes, stop and sync first — the cache is holding real work.

AutoRecover: a safety net worth understanding before deleting

AutoRecover is the other half of Office's caution: every few minutes, Word, Excel and PowerPoint write a recovery snapshot of open documents so a crash costs you minutes, not hours. The defaults are sane — Word saves recovery information every 10 minutes — but the files land in per-app folders under %APPDATA%\Microsoft, and Office never sweeps the old ones away. A machine with a few crashes a year accumulates a small museum of .asd and backup files, almost all of it safe to delete. Know the landscape first:

• Word: .asd recovery snapshots under %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Word — one per document that was open during a crash or a forced shutdown
• Excel: the same .asd system under %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Excel, where crashed workbooks wait for recovery
• UnsavedFiles under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Office — drafts of files you closed without saving, kept for four days by default
• Word .wbk backups — only if you enabled “Always create backup copy”; they live next to the document itself, not in AppData
• The control panel for all of it: File > Options > Save — the AutoRecover interval, the recovery file location, and unsaved-file retention

How to clean it safely — and what never to touch

The routine takes ten minutes a year: close all Office apps, sort the AutoRecover folders by date, keep anything from the last two weeks if you are mid-project, delete the rest, then empty the OfficeFileCache contents while Office is closed. None of this touches settings, templates or custom dictionaries — those live elsewhere, and deleting them is how people lose years of AutoCorrect entries and macros.

Three things deserve an explicit “do not touch”. The Click-to-Run folder under C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\ClickToRun holds the installer and repair data for Office itself, and deleting it breaks repairs and updates. STARTUP folders under %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Word hold global templates and add-ins that load with every launch. And if you would rather not memorize the folder map at all, Kleaner PRO's junk scan covers exactly this category of safe-to-remove Office caches and leftovers. Should Office misbehave after any cleanup, an online repair from Settings > Apps restores the plumbing without touching your files.

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