Recover Untitled Document 1 from gedit

I have an unsaved document opened in gedit on Xubuntu 13.10. A bug caused gedit's main window to disappear and only the title bar is still visible, reading "Untitled Document 1".

Is there a way to recover the typed text from the running but defunct session of gedit? Are "Untitled Documents" stored somewhere temporarily?

2 Answers

The file only seemed to be stored in RAM. All attempts to find it on disk returned nothing. Here's what I did for partial recovery:

1. Find out PID and write it down

   ps -ef | grep gedit

2. Use it to dump memory of process

   sudo gcore 12345

3. Use vim and search for keywords you remember

   sudo vim core.12345

The entire file will be fragmented, can be quite big and is littered with parts you have deleted already. Since I was not programming, but wrote an actual text, I was able to find the individual fragments and recover a large part of the text.

Ironically, after I went through all of this work and wanted to close the gedit instance it asked me if I want to save the Untitled Document 1 - which I did.

When you open a file with gedit it will create a temporary file with ~ in the name.

so just force close gedit and you can reopen that file

gedit /path-to-file/filename~

or just go to the directory from nautilus file manager

ctrl + h will show you the hidden file then search for it and open.