James Taylor shared this with us in microsoft.public.word.docmanagement:

I worked all night (16hrs), compiling data, coping and pasting it
into Word to move it to Excell later. I thought that Outlook was
opening up closed it and clicked no to save changes. It was my word
document, I lost all of it. I tried auto recovery and it gives me a
blank document and the time on the document is the time that I closed
the document that i am looking for. Please help, this document has to
be somewhere in a temp file, please help me!!!!!

Temporary files get deleted when you close Word. Hence the word
"temporary".

Next time, don't think, READ before you click. And READ IT AGAIN. And
then, READ IT BACKWARDS. Just to make sure you have READ ALL THE WORDS.

I'm sorry, but this is a hard lesson all of us had to learn some time.

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Amedee Van Gasse