Autorecover folders are empty but I need to recover my file, now what?

[carif32859200]

I accidentally saved and closed after flattening everything in my project file, and now I need to make changes. I was hoping I could pull it back from autosave but when I went to C:\Users\***\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CC 2022\AutoRecover the folder was empty (the folders for older versions of ps were empty too) even though I have "Automatically save recovery information every" set to 10 min in my preferences and I haven't cleared my cache recently.

Why would these be empty? Is there somewhere else I should look? Is there anything I can do to prevent this from happening again in the future?

I'm running Photoshop 2022 on Windows 10.

[D Fosse · Accepted solution]

Autorecovery is crash recovery. The folder is emptied in a normal shutdown.

Also note that the file has to be saved to disk at least once for the process to initiate.

There's no escape from Save and Close. That's final. Save incrementally.