Is it possible to recover lost work from my computer's temp folder?

[Lew P]

I spent the better half of my day working on a document in Photoshop and, like a fool, didn't save once. Later in the evening, Photoshop crashed suddenly, taking my hours of work with it. Desperate, I started looking up methods of recovering my work on the internet and found some promising info about recovering work from my computer's Temp folder, and converting .tmp files into usable .pdf files. I located what I believe to be the correct file due to the name, date and size, but adding .psd to the end and trying to open it simply causes an error message to pop up saying it's the wrong kind of file, while trying to open it without adding a filetype to the end causes Photoshop to stop responding. These threads and articles are apparently up to date, but I'm having no luck following their guidance, so I was wondering if anyone here had any experience with recovering lost work from their computer's Temp folder? Much obliged!

[D Fosse]

Photoshop has crash recovery, but it requires that the file is saved to disk at least once to initiate the process.

If the machine crashes, the file you were working on will automatically open on next launch. The contents of Photoshop's autorecovery folder is deleted in a normal shutdown, so if there's nothing there, there's nothing there.