Notepad++ is superior to Windows Notepad in so many ways. One of the things that makes it the the king of plain-text editors for Windows is the ability to save the files even when the user has not saved them. So when you open a new tab in Notepad++ and start typing something but fail to save it into a file on the hard drive, Notepad++ is actually saving it somewhere. The next time when you launch Notepad++, you will find these unsaved files in various tabs just like you left them the last time. Nothing is lost, all of your work is still there.
This is possible through a feature in Notepad++ called session snapshot. It saves all the edited files in the background at every few seconds. So Notepad++ session can be reloaded right from the point you left it, the next time you launch Notepad++.
However, if you are planning to reinstall Windows and want to backup these unsaved files from Notepad++, then where you should look for them? Here is a simple way to backup the unsaved files in Notepad++:
- In the Notepad++ window, select Settings in the menubar and then Preferences.
- In the Preferences window, select Backup from the left side.
- Copy the Backup path from under the session snapshot settings.
- Press Win+R to open the Run dialog, paste the path you copied in the last step and press Enter.
- In the folder that opens up, you can find all the backups of the unsaved files in Notepad++. You can copy them to a different folder to backup them.
- Whenever you want to restore these files, you have to follow the same exact steps except this time you have to copy the files from the backup to this folder. Notepad++ has to be relaunched after restoring.
As you can see in the settings, Notepad++ saves the files in the background every seven seconds. You can increase or decrease it to any value you want. You can even disable the frequent saving of the edited documents but then you might end up losing some of your unsaved work.