So I just updated yesterday & now my notes aren’t the most recent ones & I’ve lost a lot of data.

Bummer. To fully understand the rest of my reply, I highly recommend reading and understanding our Backup FAQ.

If your last run before the update was as Admin, it might not have saved your session file and/or backups in the expected manner, because of permission conflict. With modern Notepad++, you can edit protected files, and it will just ask Windows to ask you for UAC permission when you try to save, so you never have to run Notepad++ as admin for infrequent protected-file edits. (If you are frequently editing protected files, the frequent UAC might get annoying… but that would be the only situation under which I would ever even think about running Notepad++ as Admin in the modern era.)

I am positive I had auto save checked off & I had them saved to a specific folder (not the default).

There is no “auto save” option native to Notepad++. You’ll have to be more specific about the actual preference name, to give us a better understanding of how your Notepad++ is configured. (My original guess was that you meant you had “session snapshot and periodic backup” off, but see below…)

If that wasn’t working, where can I find the previous saved notes?

Your saved files are exactly where you saved them. If you don’t know where that is, no one here can search your computer for you.

As described in the FAQ, if you have “enable session snapshot and periodic backup” turned on , then the copies of files that have unsaved changes would be saved in %AppData%\Notepad++\backup. If your session file was corrupted, maybe you’ll be lucky and your unsaved-file-snapshots will still be in that backup directory.

Actually, you might want to try your %AppData%\Notepad++\session.xml.inCaseOfCorruption.bak file:

• Exit Notepad++
• Windows Explorer, go to %AppData%\Notepad++
• Rename session.xml to session.xml--keep
• Copy session.xml.inCaseOfCorruption.bak to session.xml
• Run Notepad++
• → If it’s now showing the right copy of your files, great!
• If not, exit Notepad++, delete session.xml, and rename session.xml--keep back to session.xml

If the session experiment didn’t work, then look in the %AppData%\Notepad++\backup folder, and open those files directly in Notepad++. If any of them are the most recent versions of your files, great, save them to the right location under the right name, and look into version control and/or external backup so you don’t lose important data again.

(update: I added that procedure as a third section in the backup FAQ for easy reference going forward)

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Admin mode: ON

Running with Admin mode will sometimes mess up saved preferences, etc. No one’s found a cause, but my theory is the different ways that Windows OS treats %AppData% (where the config files are stored) when you’re the normal user vs the admin user.

Periodic Backup: ON

This contradicts my guess as to what you meant when you said “auto save checked off”. My answers above do explain things to check, assuming that you had Periodic Backup turned on before your update, too.