I really need to go back to the save I made a day ago, my time machine is not set up and files haven't been automatically uploading to cc is there anyway I can go back a day in saves?

Question

Hi, I just had an issue with a photoshop document, my mac book temporarily crashed the screen glitches and deleted some vital layers I had constructed (took half a day) I thought I could correct it and saved it a few times in a panic and now i really need to go back to the save I made a day ago, my time machine is not set up and I just realised my files haven't been automatically uploading to cc is there anyway I can go back a day in saves?

Answer 1

Trevor.Dennis wrote:
So you don't have anything like Shadow Protect running in the background?
Video editing software only needs to save the steps taken to achieve the edit, and references the actual video files from the hard drive.  So the saved files are only tiny, and it takes very little drive space to auto save to incrementing file names.  Obviously, Photoshop files can be huge by comparison, so the only way to save with a different file name is to do it manually.
I think most regular posters to this forum make a point of updating the file name of a large project every hour or so, and as a direct response to reading so many horror stories like your own.  The worst story I remember was from a poster whose computer had crashed half way through saving a large PSD file.  After several response, questions and answers, it turned out he was using a laptop with a failing battery.  He told us that he could see the battery was getting low, but left it and left it before finally hitting Ctrl s and running off to find the laptop's power lead. When he got back the laptop had run out of power and shut down, and his PSD file was lost forever.  He may have been a prime candidate to a computing Darwin Award, but his stupidity still did the rest of us a service so we could learn from his mistake.
Ouch. 
My digital audio workstation works on the same principle; it creates a backup save just in case things go wrong (which--knock on wood--hasn't happened to me) and only references audio/MIDI files that are related to the project.
My advice is to always, always back up sensitive documents. There are lots of ways of doing this, from manually to automatically. (e.g., A lot of higher-end routers let you connect external storage via USB so you can run backup software that detects any changes to a monitored folder over a network and then backs up any changed/updated documents to the connected storage. I prefer to do it myself manually, though.)