Any way to recover after "Empty Trash"?

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#1

About two weeks ago, while stressing on a work project, I accidentally selected Empty Trash. Not something I meant to do, but at the time, I was focused on other things, so I just assumed, “who cares, if I already trashed it, I will never need it again.”

Now, I’m realizing that I lost data in another database, and it’s text I had originally written in Drafts, and trashed after I copied it to the other database. Is there any way to undo an empty trash? I have computer backups via Backblaze, and I’m hoping the info might be saved there.

To be clear, this is not a Drafts problem. But I’m hoping there might be an end-around solution to help with my other problem. thanks!

#2

Empty trash is very permanent. It wipes the content and all versions for the draft…so it’s not recoverable in the app.

If you have backups active, you may well have a snapshot backup that contains the draft in iCloud Drive/Drafts/Backups/. Those backup files are actually JSON format files. I’d recommend you open them in another text editor that works with large files and search for the content to see if you can get out just what you need.

The backups can be restored into Drafts, but it’s not granular, and you probably don’t want to restore the full back and end up with duplicate content.

#3

thanks! I do have backups active, and I have Bbedit, so I’ll try doing a multi-file search through the export files.