I have this habit of creating new files that I don’t get around to actually finding a place for in my file system, which means their windows end up being titled “Untitled [some number]”.
MacOS’ built-in auto-save and restore-windows feature has helped this be an acceptable strategy during the past 8 years, since unsaved windows are always correctly restored after restarting the app or the computer.
…until MacOS Catalina. After upgrading to Catalina in December, I have now had my second data loss situation because the restore-windows feature only restored my saved documents, and not the unsaved once. This used to work 100% reliably in both TaskPaper (and TextEdit, which I used in a similar way before falling for TaskPaper). Now it seems to work 95% of the time, which is makes a huge difference.
It’s probably a Catalina problem and not a TaskPaper one, so I’m not sure this bug report actually means there’s something to fix in TaskPaper, but any pointers on how I might be able to restore the lost data is much appreciated.
In case anyone else has this problem, I found out my unsaved and non-restored documents could be found in ~/Library/Autosave Information. That just saved me a lot of grief!
You may very well be right, even if I’ve only encountered this behavior with TaskPaper – Safari, TextEdit and other apps where I also keep things open for months at a time has yet to fail me in a similar way.
I don’t think the versioning database thing is related, as I’m pretty sure this is merely related to application state restoring. As mentioned in my update, I even found the “unsaved” files that weren’t reopened, so I’d think the code that was supposed to reopen them is to blame. Whether the part that fails is inside TaskPaper or outside it is anyone’s guess at this point.
