How do we "restore" notepad after crash?

No. Notepad is designed to be lightweight and minimalist.

There may be other notepad programs out there that may do what you want.

NotePad++ creates a backup file you might find at:

%AppData%/Notepad++/backup

This trick saved me so much time and work! I hope this works for you too!

There are lots of text editors that have auto-save save functionality, two of note:

• Notepad ++ with this plugin: https://sites.google.com/site/fstellari/nppplugins
• EmEditor (not free version)

It is not 100% true that notpad data can not be recovered in any case. It depends on the type "shut down" itself. It is possible to create a full memory dump when windows crashes and a restart is forced (e.g. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/254649/overview-of-memory-dump-file-options-for-windows). If the dump is created, the content of the notepad instance will be saved in the memory dump file and can be recovered.

But in most cases the default settings are still active so no complete memory dump will been created and the data unfortunately will lost after the restart. So if you can not use notepad++ (which is the better option in terms of prevention of data loss and data recovery, as most people pointed out correctly) make sure to set windows to create the memory dump in the event of a crash.

In one of my answer (for my own question): How do I recover the content from Notepad when the task froze? I describe how to recover notepad data from a memory dump. Please note that this is not a complete memory dump but just a dump for the notepad instance/process/task (eg when notepad freezes). The complete memory dump will be much larger because it has the data of all processes. But in essence it can be done in the same fashion.

I know this is an old questions but since so many people still use notepad I thought it is worth to add another answer. Feel free to modify it to give more detailed instructions for users that need a step-by-step guide. Or add a comment with a specific question and I will try to give out more informations.