0

I'm using Windows 10. I have a notepad file with some important information in it that I update frequently. I am 100% certain it was saved with the latest information before I needed to do a cold reboot on my computer (holding the power button down for 10 seconds).

After starting the computer up again, I notice the notepad file did not contain the latest information I saved, rather the information was from a version of it from my last reboot (over a week ago, I've been hibernating since then). This is despite the fact that the modify date was just a couple of hours before the cold reboot was required. It does sound peculiar but could it perhaps be a bug with Windows?

Is there any way I can recover the data I recently saved in this notepad file before the cold reboot? Again, I'm 100% certain it was saved with the information in it.

I realize this sounds ridiculous and the obvious answer is I didn't save it with the information I added to it. I'm certain this isn't the case, but assuming it was, would it be possible to somehow navigate through hiberfile.sys to find the recent content I added to the notepad file from my last hibernation? Would hibernation store the notepad content into hiberfile.sys if for whatever reason windows didn't save the file? How would I search hiberfile.sys for this information?

As is obvious I cannot afford to lose the information that was added to this notepad file since the last reboot.

Improve this question
3
  • By default, Windows caches writes to HDD, as opposed to portable media such as USB flash drives. Regrettably, this means that the data was not actually written to disk, Windows 95 was really bad in that respect: with "cooperative multitasking", if any one process crashed, all did and all cached writes were lost. Sorry about that.
    – DrMoishe Pippik
    Commented Mar 21, 2017 at 3:20
  • I see, thank you for clarifying that, now it makes perfect sense! This seems ridiculous behaviour. Is there any way I can actually write a file to HDD in Windows besides restarting every time I want to save something? I read an article saying that the write should happen when the computer has sufficient resources to make the write. I remember saving this change days ago. How could it be no actual write occurred for days? There must have been some idle time to make the write. The only thing I can think of is I never closed the notepad file, it was always open.
    – user4779
    Commented Mar 21, 2017 at 3:30
  • Usually, files are written in a matter of seconds or minutes. If it was a few days since you tried to save the file, then it's possible that it has been written, and you might be able to find its "remains" with a disk editing tool. There are ways to force flushing of of the write-cache: 1) turn of write caching (mywindowshub.com/…), which may slow thing a bit, or 2) use SysInternals Sync to flush the cache: technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897438.aspx
    – DrMoishe Pippik
    Commented Mar 21, 2017 at 3:36

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
0

The file was most probably not written to the HDD/SSD from the cache. I had this situation often with USB Sticks or ext. HDD if I copied files and didn't wait long enough before removing the device... There is no way back.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .