Recovering deleted iPython Notebooks cells

Life is full of surprises!

Something intresting happened to me yesterday with my work computer. I worked on a Python script to batch import data from two excel files, merge them, and send POST requests to multiple REST endpoints.

I had it working. I saved the file. As usual, after 4, I went home. The computer was in sleep mode. The following day, I found out that the Python notebook had crashed. I restarted the notebooks, and I was surprised to find out none of the code I did yesterday persisted in the notebook.

Seriously! It appeared to me that yesterday was missing from my month. I could have recoded as it was fresh in my brain, but I tried to find out if I could recover the code.

So, I did what everyone would have done. I checked if a version of the notebook is saved. Nope!

I checked if the notebook had checkpoints saved. Nope!

Desperate enough, I even tried to press CTRL + Z, thinking some magic might happen.

I googled!

Some blogs said if the file is deleted, try the cache version like ~/.cache/chromium/Default/Cache/ and then use the grep command to find keywords in your code. I tried, did not work.

Some blogs and StackOverflow mentioned checking Trash if it is deleted.

I tried several other options. None of them worked. Then I found an answer where I could save all my IPython history to a file. And Bingo! The command saved my day.


%history -g -f anyfilename

Just execute the command in a cell in your notebook. The command writes all the history to a file named anyfilename.

And there you go.

Happy Recovery !!