I accidentally clicked out of Pico 8 without saving my changes to my game. I found the back up file, how can I restore it?
Thank you.

Transfer the BACKUP file to the area where your standard programs are loaded.

Then in the PICO-8 IDE, type out "LOAD [name]" followed by the backup name, which, for instance, might be something like, "44572."

Let me know if you have difficulties because there's another more complex way to retrieve your unsaved .P8 file.

Thank you so much, it worked! This saved me a lot of frustration.
Thanks again :]

Glad to help !

If it's an important project, save about every hour, you can even attach a date or marker on the end of the file:

"mywork-adding-shooter-08-25-18" or something. This may seem redundant but if you ever get in a fix, and I have, you can resort to your backup from a day or a few hours ago.

Good luck !

And of course, use version control. I usually set up a new git repo for every new project, and make a symlink to the versioned file inside the carts folder.

hi
i was doing a school project on pico 8 and then forget to save it. I then closed off the tab and now I realized that I didn't save it, or give it a title. What can I do?

Find the directory where the config file lives (for me it’s $HOME/.lexaloffle/pico-8) and look inside the 'backup' directory. You should see all the files you have edited there, with date and time added to the filenames.

What @merwok said, but I'll offer an easy way to find the backup folder on pretty much every OS:

By default, the "backup" folder and the "carts" folder are both in PICO-8's user data folder.

If you type "folder" at any PICO-8 command prompt, it should pop up an OS file-exploring window set to the "pico-8/carts" folder, so from there you just go up one level and you should see the "backup" folder right there.

The "yyyymmdd_hhmmss_untitled.p8" file with the latest timestamp in the name is what you'd want in this case:

[+] ???
 └─[+] pico-8
    ├─[+] backup
    │  ├──── 20200526_135126_mycart.p8
    │  ├──── 20200527_093707_mycart.p8
    │  ├──── 20200529_111940_mycart.p8
    │  └──── 20200605_154459_untitled.p8  <- the latest one
    └─[+] carts
       └──── mycart.p8

(Love that "folder" command, btw, @zep. Stroke of genius, tbh.)