I Need to Degarble a Text File

1

Here's my dilemma:
I'm NaNoWriMoing in a text file backed up with Dropbox, and so I was offline for about 5 hrs and working on my novel. Unfortunately, the computer overheated/ran out of battery/whatever and it did a hard kill (really need to move off these $300 netbooks). So now I have a garbled novel. It's not large--only about 30kb--but would still take a while to rewrite.

What's the best utility/method to try to recover a garbled text file?

(OS doesn't matter. I have access to all 3 major OSs on Saturday. Also, if relevant, I was using FocusWriter when the computer killed itself.)

digitxp

Posted 2010-11-06T01:18:32.923

Reputation: 13 502

open it via a Notepad++ / HexEditor and try to grab the text ? PS: All the best! – Sathyajith Bhat – 2010-11-06T01:23:32.113

Would that work? I'm writing in Unicode. – digitxp – 2010-11-06T01:27:43.113

Unicode ? Damn. Worth a shot though – Sathyajith Bhat – 2010-11-06T01:30:59.120

Answers

2

One of the features of Dropbox is that you can rollback to previous versions, or undelete deleted files. Go to the Dropbox website, find your folder and choose More Actions > Previous Versions.

You can also look in the local Dropbox cache folder:

%appdata%\dropbox\cache

paradroid

Posted 2010-11-06T01:18:32.923

Reputation: 20 970

Did that. I love Dropbox. Too bad I synced a whole 5 hours ago :-(. – digitxp – 2010-11-06T01:27:14.517

@digitxp: Try looking in the local cache then. I'll edit my answer. – paradroid – 2010-11-06T01:30:45.720

Wasn't there. I ended up having to rewrite it. Since I already knew what I was going to write, I hit the 2k mark anyway. – digitxp – 2010-11-06T13:42:46.253

Asked: 2010-11-06T01:18:32.923

Viewed: 153 times

Active: 2010-11-06T01:31:29.340