Help, need to find layers - they didn't save

[MShaffJo]

I posted this in teh Windows section too, but maybe I can get help here:

Please tell me there is a way to save my project... I saved it as a PSD 10 minutes ago, opened it all back up and it is flatened; no layers. Nothing is in the history either. The only thing I can think of is that I also save it as a PDF, and unchecked where it said "preserve Photoshop editing capabilities". I need those layers. Do I have to start all over?

[Michael_L_Hale]

I am afraid the answer here is the same as the one you should have received in the Photoshop Windows forum, no there is no way to recover the original layers from a flattened document after it has been closed.

The history of a just opened document always just show the open command as the first state and the documents filename as the first snapshot.

[Muppet_Mark-QAl63s]

No time machine on windows?

[Michael_L_Hale]

I'm not sure what time machine does. There are version control type apps/plug-ins for Windows, but as far as I know that only recover the saved states. So yes, it might be possible to recover a version that has layers.

Say I open document and spend some time adding layers and working on the design, never updating the original file, then saveAs to a single layer format like jpg and close the document. So there is no file version with the content as layers. Can time machine recover those unsaved layers?

[Muppet_Mark-QAl63s]

I have not tried to see if it looks at a documents modified status with an unsaved open doc. (I will give it a try) All time machine does as a rule is automated hourly backups to second hard disk at hourly intervals for last 24 hours, daily for a month & weekly until the disk is full. Just gives some piece of mind but NOT infallible…