My computer restarted and my Notepad++ tabs were gone
ChatGPT installed on my PC just solved a big problem for me.
I don’t switch off my computer. I put it to sleep at night when I wrap things up, and I did the same yesterday.
Today in the morning, I noticed that it had restarted. All the apps that I had left open were closed, and all the activities that happen after my computer boots had happened.
The alarming part was that when I opened Notepad++, there were no open tabs.
I normally keep multiple tabs open. I save random information in different tabs. Sometimes I don’t even name the files because I have never lost information on Notepad++.
With the way I have been using it, even if I don’t name a file, the tab is there the next time I open the application. After a while, you stop thinking about whether the information will be there. It always is.
This time, nothing was there.
There was one particular file I needed. It wasn’t in the recent files section, and when I asked Notepad++ to reopen recently closed tabs, it didn’t open that file either.
I couldn’t tell whether I had lost the file or just the tab through which I had been accessing it.
The project notes I thought I had lost
For the past 4 months, I have been working on a project and noting down some critical information in one of those tabs.
Much of my WordPress programming work involves referring to information that isn’t part of the code. In this case, the file contained:
- Multiple FTP logins.
- WordPress dashboard logins.
- More than twenty 301 redirect URLs along with their destination URLs.
- Multiple search strings and other project information.
Normally I save project notes in Notion, but I don’t remember when I started dumping all this information into an already opened Notepad++ tab. I must have needed to note something down quickly, and then kept adding to it.
Luckily, somewhere along the way, I had named the file and saved it. But I hadn’t consciously noted which folder I had saved it in.
I have multiple folders. I checked all the folders where I thought it could be, but the file was not there. I didn’t even remember its name. I couldn’t remember whether I had saved it on the C drive, on the D drive, or in Google Drive.
Searching for *.txt was not an option I wanted to try yet because I have thousands of files on multiple drives. That would be the last resort.
This was an important file. I was staring at wasting a good three-four hours, either looking for it or gathering the information again. The worst part was that if I had lost those 301 redirect URLs, I would need to spend a few hours more compiling them.
How ChatGPT found the file in 5 seconds
My first thought was to ask Claude, my preferred go-to tool these days, what could be done.
I prepared a prompt describing the entire situation. I couldn’t find the information I had saved, and I had no idea what the file was called or where I had put it. All I knew was that I had recently saved it through Notepad++ and it was a text file.
Then I noticed the ChatGPT window on my desktop.
Yesterday I had installed ChatGPT to do some work in Codex. When the computer rebooted, the ChatGPT window had launched too. So instead of going to Claude, I explained the situation to ChatGPT and asked if it could find the file for me.
It told me where the file was in 5 seconds. Literally 5 seconds.
It was ChatGPT I asked, not Codex. I have no idea how it found the file. It simply told me the location, so I can’t explain what it searched or how it arrived at the answer.
And where was the file?
In the folder where I was saving all the project files.
Since I never save text files in that folder, it hadn’t occurred to me to look there. I had checked other folders while overlooking the one that, in hindsight, should have been an obvious place to check.
The file hadn’t disappeared. The tab was gone, and with it, my usual way of getting to the information.
The lesson: I need to keep my project notes in Notion
For many years, I haven’t been keeping most of my work files only on my computer or on the C drive. Most are in the cloud. As I wrote recently, I have also started using GitHub for my programming projects.
But somehow, I was still adding critical information to a Notepad++ tab and relying on it being there whenever I needed it.
There is nothing wrong with using Notepad++. I had even saved the file. The problem was that I had forgotten where I saved it and had started treating the open tab as a permanent way to access it.
I hadn’t made a conscious decision to keep four months of project information there. It just happened, a few lines at a time.
I should be saving all my project notes, apart from passwords and other credentials, in Notion. That includes the redirect URLs, search strings and other details I need while working. Credentials need a separate, secure place.
Having my code on GitHub doesn’t mean these notes are saved there too. I need to pay attention to where I put the information I use alongside the code.
ChatGPT saved me the trouble of searching for the file or compiling the information again. But I already had a place for these notes.
I need to use it, even when an open Notepad++ tab seems more convenient.