Text File Almost Totally Obliterated

For ease of use, I have, for decades, kept a large ASCII text tile for telephone numbers, info on product searches, etc, and, out of old habit, use ALT-F-S to save before closing. While doing so yesterday, I happened to(I think) brush the mouse or the keyboard; there was a brilliant blue/white flash, onscreen, and all text was replaced by a single "m". And, of course, being injured, old & stubborn, I had not done a backup in 3 months, so have lost a LOT of information. I now have it firmly in mind that the old way is not necessarily the best way, so it's a mouse click on "save" from now on. Is there any hope of retrieving any bits of my "fones" file? I used to "save as" certain files as *.bak, but when I started to back up my files on a semi-regular basis, I seemed to have dropped the habit, much to my regret.

 

Like this?

 

Just a lowercase m, like this: m

I probably hit the key by accident.

 

OK, whatever it was it would only cause loss of changes to your document in the current session. The file itself shouldn't have been erased. Has it?

 

Oops! Left out one major bit of info: the ASCII text file is kept on the desktop, so, yes, the file has been erased. I was hoping that there might be some recovery software that might gather up the odd bits & pieces of the file, and I might be able to rescue some of it.

 

Pass

 

Hopefully Recuva can help.
http://www.ccleaner.com/recuva
Click Download Free Version.

 

What program were you using? If you have not closed the app, look for edit > undo and it might bring the data back. If you have closed the program..it may be gone.

 

Many thanks to all. This morning, I tried Recuva,which I tried to use some years ago, but, today, something different: I noticed there was a choice of drives to scan, and one of the choices was Shadow Drives.

WHAT? Why haven't I heard of Shadow drives? Because I have my head buried in my own little life, and got away from my TRS-80s (anyone want one?), and DOS, etc. I recently had to transfer reams of photos, at the DOS level, because Windows suddenly wanted me to use the camera software, which promply refused to deal with me.

So, I have been reading a bit of how to retrieve files from the Shadow Drives, and will try it right after lunch, and will let you all know the results here.