Lost notes from several unsaved Wordpad windows

[Dimitri001]

I had sveral Wordpad windows open with some extremely important text in them when Windows crashed. None of the text was saved, it was just in open, unsaved Wordpad windows.

I looked in \AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\WordPad and the folder is empty (hidden files are set to show).

Is there any way for me to get this stuff back? It is EXTREMELY EXTREMELY important.

I'm running Windows 10.

[Dimitri001]

Most likely NOT ...

Unless your system did save those files to some sort of pagination file / virtual memory saved to disk you are out of luck.

Data on RAM is stored there up untill you power down the computer as power will left the RAM chips and your data there will be lost ... RAM is Random Access Memory and is not saved neither preserved after re-power.

Your only chance is if WINDOWS did copy that data to the drive pagination file to free RAM for other tasks... On that case you would still need to :

NOT POWER THE SYSTEM ANYMORE to preserve the pagination file.

Move the drive to a 3rd system and attempt to carve the TEXT out of the pagination file by looking for known TEXT strings using for example a hex editor or disk editor ...

It will be extremely hard and you will need lots of luck ...

Might I be able to do that without moving the drive? Could I just open it with notepad (I'm not familiar with hex editors or disk editors), or some other way?

[dick]

They are probably lost now, especially if the device has been restarted.

You might try searching through the *.tmp temp files. You can do it using the date and time parameters. You might get lucky!