Notepad++ Deleted recent documents please help!

kelly w · Jan 21, 2016, 9:16 PM

I opened Notepad++ and went to open a recent document. I clicked on it and it didn’t open ; It removed itself from the recent documents list. I tried another one, same thing. Then I went into my documents folder and they are GONE! These are extremely important and I need them back! They are not in the recycle bin and I don’t see them in the %temp% folder.

Can someone please help? I opened another document in ‘notepad’ and It opened fine. I still have 1 saved and 3 unsaved documents in Notepad++ that haven’t disappeared.

Claudia Frank · Jan 21, 2016, 9:30 PM

Hello kelly-w,

if this is a recent standard npp installation you propably have session and backup activated.
If so, open explorer and navigate to the notepad++ directory, there should be a directory called backup. Is this the case?
If so, are these documents still in this folder?

Actually I don’t think that npp deletes a document if it can’t be find but I might be wrong.

Cheers
Claudia

kelly w · Jan 21, 2016, 9:45 PM

Hi Claudia

There is no backup in Notepad++ Directory under C:. There is backup folder under Roaming > Notepad++ but it doesn’t have the missing files. It only has documents that are CURRENTLY open in Notepad++ but not actually saved to the computer.

The files I am missing were saved in My Documents. These have been on the computer as long as Notepad++ itself… 3 years or so.

I ran a deep scan with Recuva software of documents / my documents across my 3 hard drives and it found nothing.

Claudia Frank · Jan 21, 2016, 10:08 PM

Hi Kelly,

phew - that doesn’t sound good. I would give it a try to let recuva scan the whole disks.
Will take a while but if the documents are important…
Another option would be to ask professional data disk repair companies which
doesn’t guarantee that they can recover the files and it might be expensive too.

Sorry, don’t have any better idea at the moment.
I’m still confused that npp should be able to delete files which cannot be found by recuva or
similar software. Did you run hard disc check utilities to see if disc starts dying?
Crystal disc info …

Cheers
Claudia

kelly w · Jan 21, 2016, 10:12 PM

Hi Claudia

Yes, I ran CrystalDiskInfo. All my drives show as GOOD. I have 2 SSD’s and 1 mechanical hard drive. The documents were located on my mechanical drive under My Documents.

I don’t understand why they randomly deleted! All I did was click on a file from the recent documents list in Notepad++. If I open another one of those files in the recent list with Notepad or Microsoft Office, it opens just fine.

Claudia Frank · Jan 21, 2016, 10:26 PM

Hi Kelly,

the behaviour, disappearing from recent list after clicking, was encountered by npp version < 6.8 (I guess).
But npp didn’t delete the file, npp wasn’t just unable to find the file and therefore deleted the entry in the list.
Newer version show a message box that file doesn’t exist anymore and ask if it should be created. Yaron
asked for this enhancement once. I know this doesn’t help you at the moment…, hard disk is ntfs formatted?
Currently thinking about possibility to get backup mft working but I would assume that recuva does this
anyway.

Cheers
Claudia

kelly w · Jan 21, 2016, 10:56 PM

Hi Claudia

I am using version 6.6 of Notepad++. The file has never been moved from My Documents so I don’t understand why it would disappear randomly. I rebooted into Safe mode and ran Recuva Deep Scan across all the drives. I couldn’t find either of my files.

Now I will try opening another document from the recent documents list. I will copy it to the desktop just as a backup. Lets see what happens…

kelly w · Jan 21, 2016, 11:42 PM

Claudia,

I was able to open multiple documents from the recent list in Notepad++ without any problems.

The good news is I found those 2 “missing” files on an external hard drive… In my haste of looking for these missing files, I wasn’t reading things clearly. The 2 files on the external drive are also under the My Documents directory, but the drive letter was different. So I was thinking they were on the computer, but really they were on the external hard drive. I use to use this external drive in the computer, but I took it out and made it as a backup.

So it doesn’t look like I lost anything at all. I was panicking and doing things way too fast… Organizing by date modified, using Recuva, doing multiple searches… I feel stupid.

I unplugged the external hard drive and tried opening one of those documents from the recent list; It disappears with no warning like you said. So that is how this all started.

Claudia Frank · Jan 21, 2016, 11:48 PM

Hi Kelly,

good to see that the docs are still available but now it’s time to update npp, isn’t it? ;-)
Don’t feel stupid - who solved it? - yourself. Be happy ;-)

Cheers
Claudia