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How to/can I recover an untitled TextEdit document I was working on, and accidentally closed without ever saving or titled it?
I had been writing notes for 3 hrs, I had never closed or titled the doc.
When I went to do so, I got flummoxed when presented w/an unexpected dialogue box (it was set to put the doc somewhere other than the desktop as would be my usual). So I cancelled, then closed the doc w/ commnd-w again, and accidentally hit Don't Save. No!
I don't see anything in TimeMachine listed under the desktop that's labeled Untitled...
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If you never saved it, it simply won't be there for Time Machine to recover.
Save more often.
Jeff
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I was afraid of that. Oh well, back to the drawing board.
Thanks.
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Back in the old days of beige Macs with a couple of MB of RAM there was a core-dump procedure in the debugger which extracted the contents of the computer's memory into a file from which you could extract the text of a file you were working on.
It often took a few hours to run.
It turns out that the ability is still there. On modern Macs with a couple of GB or more of RAM, I imagine it would take quite a long time to do the dump.
'Looks like it's supposed to be enabled prior to the event that you want to capture in order to work, but there is a procedure to enable it retroactively.
...Probably a bit more complicated than you'd like.
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I use Spell Catcher's Ghostwriter to capture my keystrokes. It has saved my butt a few times. I believe there are other standalone apps that do the same.
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"I got flummoxed when presented w/an unexpected dialogue box (it was set to put the doc somewhere other than the desktop as would be my usual). So I canceled, then closed the doc w/ command-w again, and accidentally hit Don't Save. No!"
I know it's too late, but next time, use CMD-d and the dialog box will go to the desktop... those cmd-w habit can get you into trouble - I've done it several times too...
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Hi -
This is a year later, but I was able to go into Time Machine and find a Text Edit document that I had never saved, and so thought was lost.
Basically, I went back into the correct date (a month prior) in Time Machine, then searched for certain words that I knew were in the missing document. I used the standard Finder box that appeared in Time Machine for that snapshot.
To my suprise the missing doc came up as Unsaved Text Edit Document 3, which contained all the information I needed.
I wasn't able to figure out how to get the info "back out," though - select & copy did not work, nor did the standard Mac screen capture tool, nor did the "Open in Text Edit" button that appeard at the top of the document. However, it did display the file so I was able to see and obtain what I needed.
I don't know if that helps at this late date - also, my file was sitting on my desktop for a few days, instead of just a few hours, so perhaps some auto-save operation ran that yours did not have time for. Worth checking into if this ever happens to you again.
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Doc wrote:
Back in the old days of beige Macs with a couple of MB of RAM there was a core-dump procedure in the debugger which extracted the contents of the computer's memory into a file from which you could extract the text of a file you were working on.
It often took a few hours to run.
It turns out that the ability is still there. On modern Macs with a couple of GB or more of RAM, I imagine it would take quite a long time to do the dump.
'Looks like it's supposed to be enabled prior to the event that you want to capture in order to work, but there is a procedure to enable it retroactively.
...Probably a bit more complicated than you'd like.
Ok, I know this is an old thread. But I'm looking for a long-shot solution.
Doc, would you mind posting a link to/explaining how to enable debugging retroactively? I had two stickies files open, wanted to close one, and hit cmd+w. A dialog box asked me if I wanted to save my changes, and I clicked don't save. This closed both stickies. Would it be at all possible to use the file containing the contents of my computer's memory to retrieve the stickies file?
Normally I would use Time Machine to recover files, but I hadn't created a backup using Time Machine after I created this file.
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Whoops, it seems the answer was in that tech-note Doc linked to. You can enable core dumps retroactively, not debugging it seems. Which wouldn't help me, right? I would have had to start the debugging process before I created my Stickies files, and then once I lost the files, gone back and enabled core dumps. Correct?
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Just an update that may prove helpful to anyone wanting to recover files from a core dump: I asked a few people more knowledgeable about this stuff than I am, and basically what they said was that it's possible that the contents of the file may be able to be extracted, but only with the program's source code, or its debugging symbols. Neither of which I have, of course. Not to mention that I don't have time to learn how to use GDB, or increase my extremely limited knowledge of Obj-C. While I could look for ASCII strings that represent the lost data, it's really not worth that much trouble.
I hope this info proves useful for someone else, though.
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