One of my favorite, must-have Firefox plug-ins is It’s All Text.  Not only does it make writing long entries in web forms pleasant, it can also save your bacon.  Just today I wrote a long email in Gmail using It’s All Text and then accidentally navigated to a new web page.  Returning to the Gmail window, most of what I had written was gone, but there was still hope.

Navigating to ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/itsalltext I found a text document that contained everything I had written and saved upon exiting the text editor. You might have to look through a few files, but hopefully you can use the date and time stamp to make an educated guess.

$ ls -la ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/itsalltext
-rw-------. 1 user user 1065 2010-01-22 17:59 fedoraproject.org.2u2r2r1z2u.txt
-rw-------. 1 user user 2190 2010-01-22 16:46 fedoraproject.org.2z2x2b392z.txt
-rw-------. 1 user user 1220 2010-01-26 09:42 mail.google.com.241i21262s.txt

After opening mail.google.com.241i21262s.txt I simply copy and pasted the text right back into Gmail and sent the message.  The key is to save frequently while the text editor is open and upon exit.  I’m not sure how long It’s All Text keeps these files around, but I have yet to need a file that wasn’t there.