Assistance Required: Recovery of Corrupted Notepad++ Tabs

M Socin

Hello,

I am experiencing an unexpected issue with my Notepad++ tabs, and I am unsure of the cause. Historically, I have had 25 tabs open in Notepad++ since around 2019, which, due to the program’s auto-reopen feature, I never found the need to save. However, today I discovered that all of these tabs had disappeared. Interestingly, they were present and functioning correctly just yesterday.

To address this, I attempted to recover them through my Windows recovery copy. However, when I accessed the files and tried to verify their presence in the recovery system backup, I received a notification indicating their absence. I am curious if the system recovery functionality only restores Windows files. Consequently, I utilized a separate software to recover them.

Currently, I can open some tabs without any issue, but others appear to be corrupted, as evident in the following attachments:

1st attachment: prnt(dot)sc/AM15xH_Jg-aY
2nd attachment: prnt(dot)sc/iVKjG6DkNNl3

Has anyone encountered a similar problem, or does anyone have any suggestions on resolving this? I appreciate any guidance or support you can provide.

M Socin

the corrupted code looks like this :
.'¨}ö&
3iŮa]ž<Á«PŮ×voŹT‡xŐ@’i§–ŞŢL t‰YqÄBf"ß äâçÄďXJYdžň’ÝçtWZşĐZH±hIoŕáˇy4Ov2˛›Ôô

its in screen if you want to remove the dot

PeterJones

@M-Socin said in Assistance Required: Recovery of Corrupted Notepad++ Tabs:

I have had 25 tabs open in Notepad++ since around 2019, which, due to the program’s auto-reopen feature, I never found the need to save.

You’ve had the same unsaved files for 4+ years?! First, you’ve been lucky to date. Second, I highly recommend changing your data practices – see our FAQ section on the Backup / AutoSave, to figure out how to set things up to be safer so that you’re less likely to lose your data.

That FAQ also has some suggestions for things you can try to recover lost data – including describing the directories that things might be in, depending on your settings; but Notepad++ doesn’t have built-in file recovery, so if the file is corrupt or lost, there is nothing we or Notepad++ can do for you; the FAQ mentions that you might have success using external recovery tools, but we don’t guarantee that will work nor are we experts at their use.

.'¨}ö&
3iŮa]ž<Á«PŮ×vo ...

That looks like a binary file. If it didn’t used to be a binary file, then one of a few things happened:

A Windows crash corrupted the files.
You were infected with a virus, and the virus has corrupted your files.

Since you didn’t ever actively save or back up your important data, that data is likely lost in either case, but recovery software (as mentioned at in the FAQ) might be able to find some of your files (though it might be an older version). Good luck.

For the future, I highly recommend following data best-practices, as described in the FAQ, and taking an active role in making sure you don’t lose important data in the future (whether you edit that data in Notepad++ or any other tool; no single tool can guarantee 100% that you won’t lose data due to circumstances outside their control).