If "Recover earlier versions of a file in Office 2010" doesn't work as it should be, and you lose your doc file...

If your Word or Excel document is demaged.
If  "Recover earlier versions of a file in Office 2010" and "Turn on AutoRecover and AutoSave to protect your files in case of a crash" don't work as they should be, you can find the "lost" document at current user's home directory in: AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Word\ as a .tmp file.  



After finding it just rename the file extension to .doc or .docx or .xls, .xlsx, etc.