Basic Recovery

The following commands are useful for recovering an editing session.

Retrieve a list of recoverable files.

vim -r

Recover a specific file.

vim -r .file.extension.swp (from swap files listed above)

Recover an unnamed (unsaved) file.

vim -r .swp

Or from inside of Vim:

:recover .file.extension.swp

Back It Up

This has saved my ass enough times that I feel compelled to mention it.

You can have Vim make a backup copy of any file you save right before overwriting it by adding the following to your .vimrc.

set backup " enable backups
set backupdir=/your/homedir/.vim/backup " where to put backup file

I set my tempfile directory for good measure.

set directory=/your/homedir/.vim/temp " new temp dir

Note: you will need to create the directories inside .vim before this will work.