Recovering lost posts from computer's memory?

[RangerWickett]

Last night, I wrote an epic.

An hour and a half of cunning narrative and stirring drama emerged from the porous vaccuum of the internet, appearing in a dialogue box on EN World, much like the one in which I type now. And then, disaster! Woe! Double double, toil and trouble, team rocket's gonna rock you.


. . . Ahem.

For no discernable reason, internet explorer just closed. All the windows simply went away.

Now, I doubt I can fix this current instance, but in the future, I imagine there should be some way to recover information lost like this. The computer has to keep a memory of things it has typed that have not yet been sent, right? Is there any way I could have recovered the lost post?

 

[IronWolf]

To my knowledge it is gone.

The easiest way to prevent such things from happening though is to compose lengthy posts in notepad or any other editor as you go. Then save the changes as you go, when you are done copy and paste into the new post. That's what I do anytime I write a lengthy post.

 

[RangerWickett]

Y'know, I knew somebody was going to suggest that. I must apologize, but I'm irritated that you brought it up. I actually would regularly copy all the text I had written, so that if I lost it, I could just paste and everything would be fine. But somehow, when IE closed, I lost everything I'd copied. Yay me.

So yeah, I know I made a mistake. I feel stupid about it.

 

[Vascant]

The post you typed is held in the same memory space allocated by IE, when it crashed and died.. so did the memory. Now there are still footprints no doubt but no simple method of getting access to them, would be faster just to retype.

There are some kinds of key loggers that may do the trick for you, though they are normally used to spy on people using your computer however the same functionality could be used to keep a record of the things you type.

Just an idea.

 

[Psionicist]

This is a pretty interesting question, computer science wise. When a program wants some memory it asks the computer (operating system) "hey, can I have some memory?". The operating system will check if there's memory available and if it is, it will tell the program "sure" and the program can use that memory until the program shuts down or tells the operating system "hey you know that memory? I don't need that anymore".

Here's the interesting part: When the program don't need memory it has previously used, or if the operating system notices the program has crashed or is closed, it will just remember the memory used by the program is free for use by other programs. It will not "erase" the previously used memory. So, in theory, your post existed in the computers memory for a short while, until another program decided it could use some memory.

This "short while" is, unfortunately, probably only a few seconds, so there was really nothing you could do to save your post.

I feel your pain though, this is highly annoying. I know there are extensions to FireFox that will periodically save the contents of a textbox, but this won't help you know (or if you use IE).

 

[IronWolf]

Y'know, I knew somebody was going to suggest that. I must apologize, but I'm irritated that you brought it up.

Didn't mean to irritate. Just suggesting what works for me.

 

[Cergorach]

I wonder if there's a fitrefox plugin that saves data typed in text files in a txt file (at regular interfalls). That would save me so much irritatation...

Not only have i had the same experience as RW, it also happens when i am not copying the wole thing to/from notepad. When i do follow the save path nothing nasty happens, so my guard drops, and you know the rest...

 

[ssampier]

I wonder if there's a fitrefox plugin that saves data typed in text files in a txt file (at regular interfalls). That would save me so much irritatation...

Not only have i had the same experience as RW, it also happens when i am not copying the wole thing to/from notepad. When i do follow the save path nothing nasty happens, so my guard drops, and you know the rest...

Ask and ye shall receive*

http://prismicspiral.com/scribe/index.html

*I haven't used it, but it looks like Scribe will accomplish what you want. It needs an integrated spell and grammar check.

 

[ThirdWizard]

I use SessionSaver Firefox extention. Not only does it save forms when Firefox closes, but it saves all open webpages that were open in all of Firefox's tabs. So, if you accidently close Firefox, or if it crashes for some reason, when you open Firefox again, it will open all the previous webpages as well as fill in any forms you had filled in. I was saved by this just the other day.

It also allows you to save predetermined groups of pages and open them all with a click. I highly reccomend it. I have one for my webcomics, for example. I hit the "Comics" in the tools menu and it brings up all my webcomics.

The only bug with it is that it closes all my currently open Firefox windows when I pick a preset Session, so I can't do it if I'm browsing other pages. Ah well.