autosave and lost files

[MedBooster]

Is there a recovery system for lost files?
I had worked on a PDF for 30 minutes or so and suddenly the program closed by itself and nothing was saved.
In word you would sometimes be able to recover it because it has an autosave feature that is just like a backup, not something that actually overwrites the file

[Paul - PDF-XChange]

Hi MedBooster,

yes, there are "AutoRecover" features.

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We keep only a list of changes made, no changes, nothing recorded. In the event of an unclean shutdfown it should prompt you next start that there were unapplied changes.

Was that turned on?

[PHK]

I suppose that the user could also elect to always use incremental save (the first save-document preference option) if file size is not an issue, as it probably would not be with a new document. This could be a serious anxiety reducer.

[Daniel - PDF-XChange]

Hello, PHK

Incremental save simply appends additional data to the file structure, like digitally signing does, it would not help in cases like this where the file could not be saved normally.
Following that, we do not actually have any way to view/recover the incremental save data in our application, it is a legacy feature that was left in place, but doesn't really have a partner feature to use the additional saved data. nor does the dev team intend to offer one at this moment in time.

As it stands, Autorecover would be the only feature we offer that helps with this situation.

Kind regards,

[MedBooster]

yes autorecover actually was on, but I still haven't been able to recover it... (incremental save was turned off)

[Daniel - PDF-XChange]

Hello, MedBooster

Unfortunately, if the autorecovery data is not immediately displayed upon re-open, that would mean that something prevented us from saving it properly to our %tmp%/PDFXEdit folder before the crash occured. As the default increment is once every 5 minutes, that would mean either it was blocked from the moment the software opened, or you did not make any changes to the file until after the 25 minute mark.

Since you said you have been working on it for 30 minutes or so, I expect the latter is not the case, so My first reccomendation would be to close our software, double check (and backup to another folder just in case) the contents of the PDFXEdit folder, and then delete the folder itself (not just the contents, but the whole PDFXEdit folder within %tmp% ).

The next time you launch the Editor, ensure you do so as a normal user (DO NOT RUN AS ADMIN). This should recreate the PDFXEdit folder with the correct permissions so we can access it.

After that, close the software again, and replace the old backed up contents of the folder into the newly created version. If there is any recovery data contained within, the next time you launch the editor, it should properly prompt you to use it. If there is no prompt, I am afraid that the data may be lost to time.

Kind regards,