Notepad Document Saved Improperly (flash Drive)

Hello again, MajorGeeks -- it sucks that I always have to come back here with a new problem.

If you've followed my other thread recently, you'll know that my laptop computer has been behaving strangely when operating in Normal Mode for more than a couple of months now. I've been getting by thanks to Safe Mode With Networking, but I still need to use Normal Mode occasionally for some things. Earlier last week, I was typing out something on a Notepad document from my Kingston flash drive; Notepad is useful, but unfortunately doesn't auto-save like other word processors. Anyway, I had to step away from my laptop for several minutes, and once I got back, I was ready to close my document and save my work. Unfortunately, for no apparent reason, my computer became unresponsive once I got ready to do the save. I clicked "Ctrl-S" once the computer and mouse cursor unlocked in a brief moment, then tried to close the document to perform a save that way, but after more than 20 minutes passed with no apparent response from the document, I was forced to perform a killswitch shutdown. I wasn't confident that the document saved until I decided to try again earlier today. I found that the document only partially saved; while about 80% of what I typed days earlier was present in the document, I eventually realized that about 20% of the document was missing -- literally cutting off in the middle of a sentence at the bottom of the document.

With part of this document seemingly lost, I wanted to ask if there was something that could be done to correct this loss of information in this document; unfortunately, I don't remember the original information well-enough to type it in all over again, and Notepad doesn't have an auto-save feature that would have prevented this. I'm not even certain if the flash drive would have had some kind of information on the file before the failed overwrite for me to "roll back" to or not. I had the forethought to copy the flawed file to my computer desktop to keep working on that instead of overwriting new data to the drive (just in case I can "roll back" somehow), so there's been no new saves to this file since that partial save from earlier last week. I don't know if that information would be helpful at all, but there it is.

If there's any suggestion that could be useful in this situation, even if it's one I haven't thought of or wouldn't think of, feel free to leave a comment. I'm notoriously busy between posts, so I apologize in advance if it takes me a while to respond (not to mention that Alerts from MajorGeeks haven't been appearing in my email whenever people comment on posts here), but I hope to hear from anyone that believes that they could help out very soon.

If you need any additional information about what happened, what equipment I have, or anything else, please ask, and I'll do my best to answer when I come back.

Thanks in advance
adonisunlimited

 

Hello MajorGeeks -- sorry I haven't had a chance to come by lately...a little surprised to see no new responses here on this topic.

Again, if anyone has anysuggestions on how to reinsert any lost information on a word-processor document that incorrectly saved, please feel free to leave a reply soon.


Thanks again,
adonisunlimited

 

If the text didn't get saved to disk, then there's nothing to recover (especially after a hard reboot). If you need auto-save capability, then Notepad is the wrong tool for the job. Read this article:

11 Best Autosaving Notepad Apps for Windows
https://thetechbeard.com/best-autosaving-notepad-apps-for-windows/​

You might want to give EditPad Lite a try (app #3 in the above article).

I also recommend doing a surface scan on that flash drive to check for bad memory.