Strange Notepad++ file recovery
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Hello everyone, my PC crashed twice within a few days. After the first crash, I turned on my PC normally and reopened Notepad++ with all the last sessions, so I found all the files as they were. The second crash, a few days later, occurred with a blue screen and a restart with a restore.
I had been away from keyboard and my PC had gone into standby mode. When I came back, I moved the mouse and pressed a random keyboard button and then the power button because I thought it had shut down going in hibernation or sleep mode (it sometimes does this when I’m away from keyboard for a long time). I pressed a second time the power button a few seconds later and a blue screen appeared, followed by restore and restart process. When Windows restarted, before loading the login screen, the operating system installed the updates I had delayed and, once the installation was complete it restarted itself again.
Chrome tabs were restored normally, as were Notepad last tabs (not Notepad++). When I opened Notepad++, a session that was at least 3 months old was showed, and the files from that session were in the backup folder but not others the from the latest ones. For the Roaming folder, Windows loaded the restore point of the last time I turn off my PC I think.
How can I access the files in this folder from a more recent restore point as with first crash?
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@Notepadder said in Strange Notepad++ file recovery:
How can I access the files in this folder from a more recent restore point as with first crash?
If the “Windows Restore Point” is what repopulated AppData, then it’s 100% up to Windows what it puts in there, including in your
...\AppData\Roaming\Notepad++\session.xmland the...\AppData\Roaming\Notepad++\backup\folder. Those two completely determine what Notepad++ thinks is the active session, and what unsaved files it shows as loaded.If the wrong files aren’t loaded, check the
...\AppData\Roaming\Notepad++\backup\and see if there are any files in there that exist but aren’t loaded; if so, they might be your other unsaved files; otherwise, you are probably out of luck.This FAQ explains how the Notepad++
...\backup\folder works in more detail, and gives hints for what you can try if you’ve lost files because of a crash… but in the event of a crash, there is no way to be 100% safe in being able to recover unsaved files (this is true in any application, not just Notepad++), which is why the focus of that FAQ is to teach you how to be more safe with your data in Notepad++ in the future. -
I’ve already checked both the session file and the backup folder, but there’s no mention of those tabs, only those from months ago, which I’ve saved, edited and closed. As I wrote, I’d like to access the most recent restore point to open the Roaming folder and transfer the files of the backup folder. The restore point used for the first crash would also be fine
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@Notepadder said in Strange Notepad++ file recovery:
I’ve already checked both the session file and the backup folder, but there’s no mention of those tabs,
If the files you are looking for are not in the Notepad++ backup directory, then they no longer exist, according to the filesystem.
As I wrote, I’d like to access the most recent restore point to open the Roaming folder and transfer the files of the backup folder. The restore point used for the first crash would also be fine
You are using the term “Restore point”, which in my mind has a very specific Windows OS meaning. If you are trying to say, “I want to find the most recent copies of my files”, it appears they were lost in the crash, and there is nothing we can do for you – the FAQ has a brief suggestion of something to try (file recovery software, which we cannot help you with, because it’s a different application, and not Notepad++ specific), but it’s up to you to try it, and we fellow Notepad++ users cannot guarantee it will find anything.
As the FAQ explains, when Notepad++ is doing the periodic backups, it stores the contents of files with unsaved changes in the backup directory. As soon as you actually save the file, that temporary snapshot goes away, because the file is saved in the known filesystem location instead. N seconds after you make another change, there will be something in the backup directory again. However, if an operating system crash causes Notepad++ to not be able to write those files – or if those files were written corrupted, because of the operating system crash, there is NOTHING that Notepad++ can do about that. Notepad++(1) is not keeping a set of linear backups with restore points – there is at most one copy of unsaved data for a given file at a time; no more.
I am sorry that you have probably lost your data. Going forward, you should really study the FAQ and user manual entries for Notepad++'s various backup options, and start taking a more active role in preserving your data, because the next time your computer crashes (and it will), you might lose your data again. And there’s nothing that Notepad++ can do if you have chosen to never save and if the crash prevents Notepad++ from successfully writing the files.
(Note 1: Assuming you are only using Session Snapshot and Periodic Backup. If you were using Backup-on-Save in Verbose mode, it would make a new copy every time you hit SAVE; but for that to work, you would have had to already been doing that, and you would have had to SAVE the file to disk regularly to get regular backups with multiple restore points.)
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@Notepadder said in Strange Notepad++ file recovery:
How can I access the files in this folder from a more recent restore point as with first crash?
If there is also a more recent Windows OS Restore Point but you selected an older one somehow (with older N++ backup folder state) during your effort to revive your PC, you can try to extract newer N++ files by ShadowExplorer.
