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Initial position

I recently bought a new computer, and I thought I have backed up all of my LaTeX files and documents from my old computer onto an external hard drive. Upon searching for old LaTeX documents in the external drive, I noticed that all of them were only available in PDF form (there were no .tex files anymore).

Question

How can I recover or reconstruct these lost .tex files?

strpeter
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Neil
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    Turn on your old computer and copy the .tex files to the external hard drive as well. – bodo Feb 20 '14 at 22:47
  • That's what I did to begin with. But when I plug the external drive into the new computer, the tex files disappear. – Neil Feb 20 '14 at 22:50
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    This question isn't really related to TeX (so is off topic for this site) tex files are just standard text files so copying them does not require any special tex application, it is just a matter of operating system use, as for any file. So you would need to ask on a forum for the operating system (you don't say which you are using). – David Carlisle Feb 20 '14 at 23:01
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    possible duplicate of How to convert PDF to (La)TeX? – Martin Schröder Feb 20 '14 at 23:21
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    Furthermore some advice: use LaTeX with a subversioning system like git. You can then push your files to a free git hosting service like github. – willeM_ Van Onsem Feb 20 '14 at 23:34
  • Welcome to TeX.SX ! may be install the same TeX editor (that you used on Old computer ) on new computer so that it may detect the .tex files with small icon. Usually any .tex files can also be opened with simple notepad editor to verify if you have \documentclass{} inside. – texenthusiast Feb 21 '14 at 01:14

1 Answers1

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You can go back to your old computer and copy them to your external hard drive but try and change their extension from .tex to .txt in case they appear that way. Don't do that in the originals but in copies. There wouldn't be any problem but just in case. As it is already mentioned in the comments .tex files are simple text files.

Adam
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