nisus.com

So, my wife accidently overwrote a file with an earlier version.

Autosave is turned on (set to "Autosave only to temporary backup files"), so I thought there might be a chance of finding an autosaved version of her most recent file--before the original it got overwritten. The Nisus Documents > Backups folder is empty. Is there anywhere else I can look? What exactly happens to the temporary backup files? Are they deleted? I didn't see anything in the trash. I even configured Finder to show hidden files, but I'm not finding anything.

I know, I know: temporary means temporary, but is there anything we can do? Is there a disk utility that might find the deleted autosaved file somewhere on the hard drive?

Thanks for any insight.

I'm sorry to break the bad news, but you're correct in that the temporary backup files are gone by now. Nisus Writer deletes the corresponding backup every time you close a file cleanly (eg: it was saved successfully somewhere else and has no outstanding changes). Basically that backup option only provides protection against unexpected problems like a power loss or a NWP crash.

As with all regularly deleted files, it's possible that a file recovery tool could recover the deleted backup (eg: if OSX hasn't reused the hard drive space), but I'm no expert on this. Do you have Apple's Time Machine turned on? Perhaps it captured the temporary backup files, or could recover an older version of your file.

In the future, you might want to turn on either of NWP's other backup options. Both of them leave behind backup files which are not deleted, but merely recycled at regular intervals.

Thanks for the reply. It's some comfort to at least have exhausted that possibility. Just curious: After you close a file cleanly, does the temporary backup go to the trash, or is it permanently deleted?

The temporary files are deleted immediately, not moved to the trash. Which makes sense, not only because it'd be a lot of trashed files, but because it's not something the user ever created directly.

If you really need to get back the older version, how about trying Data Rescue? IIRC, it allows you to recover a single file per session in free demo mode (in OS 9 days at least).
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php