Earlier today, I had a system crash which ended up me having to reset the computer through the power button. Unfortunately, I had 4 Windows Live Writer windows open with different posts I was researching about. Now, I had done quite a few hours of work with those posts and losing them would definitely be a pain in the posterior.

With Windows Live Writer 3, I had an option to automatically save posts after 2 minutes, however, To my surprise and annoyance WLW 4 which is included in Windows Live Essentials Beta does not include an option to automatically save posts after a certain time. Now, I had thought that I had lost all the work and had to rewrite all the posts again, but was saved all the double work.

Thankfully Microsoft has added a new feature which allowed for an Auto-recovery if Windows Live Writer 4 did not shut down properly or crashed. The next time I started up WLW, I saw the message from the screenshot above, clicking on the "Recover changes now (recommended)" link magically recovered all the posts again, saving me a lot of time and hassles.

This feature is not available in Windows Live Writer 3, however, you can also recover unsaved posts if WLW crashed unexpectedly by browsing through the temp folder. WLW 3 creates a temp folder at the location, where "User" is your PC username:

C:UsersUserAppDataLocalTempWindowsLiveWriter1286139640

When you browse to this folder you will see several folders in that, just view details and sort through date to look through them, the temporary post should be stored inside a file called "index.htm". You can open or view the files in this folder to find the post you could not save due to the crash. There is a 99.5% recovery rate through this folder.

However, if you want to get the benefit of Auto-recovery, go ahead and download Windows Live Essentials which also includes Windows Live Writer 4, and someone please tell Microsoft that they should not have removed a life-saver feature like Auto-save.