I just quit TextEdit and forgot to save my files that I have been working on for 2 weeks. I'm about to cry.
Please tell me how can I recover them?
How to recover TextEdit files
data-recoverytextedit
Related Solutions
TextEdit → Preferences → Open and Save
Set “Plain Text File Encoding” to “Unicode (UTF-8)” for both opening and saving files.
If that doesn’t fix it already, open Terminal.app and enter the following:
echo "0x08000100:0" > ~/.CFUserTextEncoding
Then logout and login again.
This fixes the ancient UTF-8 bug in OS X that also manifest in QuickLook.
To fix it for just a single file rather than for all files (I don’t see why you would, though), just write the extended attribute that TextEdit uses:
xattr -w com.apple.TextEncoding 'UTF-8;134217984' filename.txt
Hope this helps!
There is software that can track this folder and augment the standard behavior that you are seeing.
I find Default Folder to be the best of class, and you can try it for free and then decide if it's worth paying once you've had a chance to kick the tires a bit.
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Best Answer
If you quit TextEdit, then reopening TextEdit will re-open all your documents. If it didn't give you an option to save, then they were stored by Restore in the Saved Application State. When you next open the app, they should have been there as the application state is restored. If this did not occur, then something else went wrong and the application state was either not saved or not restored correctly (e.g. force quit whilst opening will cancel restoration of application state).
If you closed TextEdit, then all the documents will be closed, and clicking Don't Save will delete them and you will not be able to recover them.