Notepad is a basic text-editing program that you may often use to note down information or edit text without formats. Besides, the Notepad file is the same as the Notepad++ file so we can deal with them similarly. As a rudimentary program, Notepad doesn’t offer advanced features such as autosave, and file backup, thus Notepad documents can be easily lost. For example:
“I spent hours editing a text file on NotePad. The computer suddenly crashed, but my Notepad file is unsaved. Can I recover unsaved Notepad files?”
“I mistakenly deleted some .txt Notepad files from Recycle Bin. Can I recover the deleted text files?”
If you are having a similar problem: Notepad files are closed and unsaved after the crash, Notepad contents are lost during copy-and-paste, .txt files are deleted by mistake, etc., this post is going to show you how to recover unsaved or deleted Notepad files on Windows 7/8/10/11.
How to Recover Unsaved Notepad Files
It is nearly impossible to recover a Notepad file that is unsaved because the file is not written to your computer’s disk and there is nothing to recover from. But since the contents of the Notepad file have been saved in the computer memory temporarily, there is still faint hope that you can recover the unsaved Notepad documents from temporary files.
Step 1. Click Start > Search. In the search bar, type: %AppData% and hit Enter. This will open the AppData folder.
Step 2. Select Roaming to go to the path: C:UsersUSERNAMEAppDataRoaming. In this folder, search for the Notepad files and see if your lost Notepad files can be found.
Note: When your Notepad files are lost and unsaved, don’t turn them off and restart your computer. After the PC reboots, the unsaved Notepad files will be lost permanently so you won’t go on unsaved Notepad recovery on Windows 10.
How to Recover Deleted Text Files of Notepad
If the Notepad files are deleted, you can use a documents recovery program: Data Recovery to get back the deleted text files from your Windows PC. In fact, it is easier to recover deleted Notepad files than to recover unsaved or crashed files because the deleted Notepad documents have been saved, and probably are still saved, on the hard drive. Even after being deleted from the Recycle Bin, the text files are not erased from the disk immediately. By using Data Recovery, the deleted text files can be quickly recovered.
A heads-up
After a Notepad document is deleted, try not to use your computer to create a file, edit files, or download things, which will write new data into the disk and could overwrite the deleted document. Once a file is overwritten, no data recovery program can recover it.
Step 1. Install Data Recovery on Windows PC. The program is also offered in the Mac version.
Step 2. Launch the program, click Document and select the disk of your computer.
Step 3. Click Scan. The program will start to scan your disk for all your documents. After that, click the TXT folder to find the deleted Notepad files according to the file name, and created date. If the deleted Notepad files don’t appear after the first scanning, click Deep Scan.
Step 4. Once you find the deleted Notepad that you need, click Recover.
Besides recovering Notepad files, Data Recovery can also recover deleted Word documents, Excel files, presentations, photos(.png, .psd, .jpg, etc.), and more.
Wrap Up
Since Notepad cannot autosave or back up a file, we should be more careful when using Notepad to edit texts and click Save from time to time during editing. Also, it is a good idea to replace Notepad with a more advanced editor, such as Notepad++, or EditPad.
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