Bremsstrahlung

I got to actually use Time Machine to restore files from a backup for the first time, and it worked flawlessly.

As a bit of background, I have become addicted to TextEdit's Autosave feature. I often have ideas which I jot down in text documents for later. They tend to be things that I want handy so that I remember to get back to them, and are often hard to classify¹. This makes TextEdit a faithful realization of my actual desk: cluttered with little scribblings of this and that which I need to keep for a few days at least. I do have to go through and clean them out now and again to get rid of things I no longer need or no longer understand², but for the most part they just accumulate.

Here's where Autosave comes into the picture. Since I just create these files to use as scratch paper, I rarely save them, since I often don;t know where to put them or what to name them. Instead, I just let TextEdit automatically save them to ~/Library/Autosave Information. That way, If my computer loses power or crashes, after I turn it back on I reopen TextEdit, and there are all my unsaved documents³.

The only issue is that TextEdit doesn't expect me to actually use this mechanism as a means of semi-permanent storage. Therefore, it won't actually let me exit without making some decision with regard to these documents; they must be either titled and saved to a specific location or deleted. My reaction has been that since I rarely ever close TextEdit anyway, on the rare occasions that I need to, I just Force Quit it instead. Unfortunately, today I accidnetally hit ⌘Q instead of ⌘W, and then misread the dialogue which appeared as a warning that I had unsaved changes in the frontmost document (which I did, and which I didn't want to save) rather than as a warning that I had entire unsaved documents. So, I clicked 'Discard' rather than 'Cancel', even though as I released to mouse button I had the sudden realization that if the dialogue had been what I thought it was, the button would have read 'Don't Save', not 'Discard'.

Finally, Time Machine to the rescue! I had a vague notion where TextEdit stored its autosaved but untitled documents, and I found it pretty quickly. After I found that it contained only one document (which appeared to be corrupt or partially deleted as it contained only tow letters which didn't match the start of any of my documents), plugged in my external hard-drive, ran the Time Machine GUI, stepped back one, grabbed all my files, and hit 'Restore'. Done. In ten seconds I was able to bring back 50 accidentally deleted documents, some of which are over six months old without ever having been explicitly saved, despite multiple system restarts, and now a deletion.