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Friday, August 15, 2014

My Visual Studio Project Disappeared!

I worked on a Visual Studio 2012 project pretty much all day yesterday.  It was a Visual Basic .Net project.
I saved frequently.  I debugged.  I ran the project.

Overnight, windows updates (I am assuming) rebooted the system and, this morning - no more project. Gone.  Nowhere (normal) to be seen.  Apparently, I did not "save all" or save the project itself.  So all that work and testing disappeared.

I googled.  Nothing I found turned out to be helpful or if it seemed helpful, turned out to be untrue.  I panicked!  All that work gone - I saved!!!  What the Funk!?!?!

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/zainnab/archive/2010/06/30/autorecover-vstipenv0019.aspx <-- No help.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh848072(v=vs.85).aspx <-- No help.
https://www.piriform.com/recuva/download <-- No help.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/saraford/archive/2008/02/14/did-you-know-where-visual-studio-saves-auto-recovered-files-in-the-case-of-an-unexpected-shutdown-151.aspx <-- No help!!

"C:\Users\MyUserID\Documents\Visual Studio 2012\Backup Files"  had MyProject folder.  It was empty.

I cursed and searched, and cursed and searched... and then I found it:

"\\localhost\c$\Users\MyUserID\AppData\Local\Temporary Projects\MyProject" - it was all there!

I copied the folder to my documents.  Then I copied the folder to my visual basic projects folder and opened the solution file.  It is all there!  Whew!

Why the \\localhost\c$ ?  Well, I am on windows 8.1 and the "Previous Versions" tab is gone from File Explorer, but you can get to it using UNC to your own machine.  Silly, I know.

I hope this helps someone else find their hard work that a stupid thing from Microsoft caused them to loose.