Where are open, unsaved files stored?

[adn_teh]

Details:

• OS X 10.5.8
• Photoshop CS4

After completing a many-hours-long automated process (Contact Sheet II), Photoshop decided to error out on me as soon as it finished. It has a pop up that says:

    "Could not complete your request because of a program error."

It appears that I will need to force-close the application. What's frustrating is that the 102 files it generated are sitting right behind that error, but I can't get it to go away--it just pops back up when I click OK. I really don't want to lock up this computer for another day when the files are right there!

If I could only find the temporary files on my computer I'd quarantine and recover them on my own. I am a little surprised that no one seems to have asked this on Google (or maybe I just can't find it).

Where does Photoshop put its open, unsaved files?

[sudarshan.t]

Can you post a Crash Report for Photoshop here? Usually, PS saves the temp, auto-save files in your primary scratch disk location (wherever you've set that to be).

Do you have sufficient RAM allocated for Photoshop? Do you have sufficient storage space on your scratch disk? Can you try using the Contact Sheet 2 with lesser files to see if that makes a difference?

[Guest]

"Where does Photoshop put its open, unsaved files?"

Bummer, unsaved files are stored in ram (memory) and then scratch disk (temp file). In 16 years of using PS I've never been able to recover an unsaved file. Since contact sheet puts images into PS without saving I'd suggest next time (and you will need to do whatever you did all over again) you work with smaller sets of imagery to allow a pause in your work to save the files.

It would also be a great time to find out the reason for the crash (see above reply) - that can be a time consuming process but look @what you just lost. Don't feel bad, we've all been there, some of us many times a day. One of the nice things about newer versions of PS like CS5 and now CS6 (never used CS4, jumped from 3 to 5,6) is the app is much more stable when running on a stable system.

[Noel Carboni]

I'm sorry to hear of your loss of data.

For what it's worth, Photoshop CS6 has a new auto-save facility that might have helped save (at least some of) your bacon with a problem like this.

-Noel

[adn_teh · Accepted solution]

To update, I force-closed the application and then re-ran the process. On the plus side, the error did not happen again.