I have a bad habit of having zillions of open documents in TextEdit, containing brief notes that I've made. Most of these are unsaved, so they have titles like "Untitled 67".
Usually this isn't a problem, because if my Macbook crashes and reboots, TextEdit restores its state, and the unsaved files are not lost. However, just now I rebooted on purpose, and TextEdit gave me a dialogue asking if I wanted to quit with unsaved changes. I clicked "save and quit" (or words to that effect) and my machine rebooted.
Unfortunately, upon re-opening TextEdit, there are no longer any documents open. The "Recent documents" menu has only ten entries, but I had well over fifty open before I quit.
How can I get these "untitled" files back? Ideally I would like to restore the state of TextEdit, so that they will still be open windows (I close them once the issue has been dealt with), but if I can at least get back the one called "Untitled 8" it would be a big help. Since I did click "save and quit" I would hope it would be saved somewhere, but where?
The answers to Unsaved Files in OS X Lion suggest that the unsaved files can be found in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.TextEdit/Data/Library/Autosave Information/. However, on my system that folder is empty. In any case, manually messing around in ~/Library doesn't seem like the right solution to this problem, and strikes me as a recipe for disaster. If I could find the autosave files I could copy them somewhere else, but then they wouldn't be unsaved files anymore, and it would all get a bit confusing. Given what most users would expect from "save and quit", I'm hoping there will be a more "official" way to get these documents back.
I'm using Mountain Lion if it makes any difference.
Best Answer
I searched in Spotlight as well, using the term “Untitled” and reopened all the Rich Text Format documents from iCloud. Yes, it was unnerving that these are all in the cloud but I am grateful that I was able to recover them all. And now I have the task of saving 120 untitled docs!