Photoshop: how to recover a file I was working on?

It sounds like you temporarily ran out of scratch disk space. If that's it, you are dangerously low on disk space and you should try to clear out more space. If you have anything less than, say 50 GB or so, you may get into trouble again. Ideally, you should have 100-200 GB or more.

Be aware that Autorecovery is crash recovery. In a normal orderly shutdown, the contents of the autorecovery folder is deleted. Also note that the file needs to be saved to disk at least once for autorecovery to be activated.

Hi Andrea,

Sorry about the trouble experienced.

Would you mind sharing your photoshop and operating system versions? Was it a PSD file you were working on?
Was Photoshop force closed?

Try and check if the following step works.
Launch Adobe Photoshop > click "Edit "and select "Preference" > select "File Handling" > "Automatic save recovery information every * minute". Go to C:/Users/ your username here/AppData/Roaming/Adobe Photoshop/AutoRecover. Find the unsaved files, then open and save in Photoshop.

Thanks,

Ranjisha