gengel
New Member

After you file

I had the same issue, and I think I found a simple solution.  Renaming the latest of the <gobbledigook>.taxbak backup files to <TaxReturn>.tax2022 and opening (double-clicking) this, I was able to fully recover my tax return. I think this answers the original question on how to recover from the Backup files. Just to be careful, you should probably try this on a copy of the latest <gobbledigook>.taxbak file and not on your only original.

 

Some more detail: for me, Turbotax Desktop 2022 seems to save  <gobbledigook>.taxbak backup files every 10-20 minutes and doesn't clean them up. While that's fairly benign, the more serious issue is that Turbotax 2022 can lose your work (I reproduced this multiple times): I opened a <TaxReturn>.tax2022 file, made no edits, and closed the Turbotax program without saving when asked. It turns out that not saving at this point makes the previously saved <TaxReturn>.tax2022 file disappear from my hard drive. 

 

I should add that I was working on a folder that was automatically mirrored real-time to an external Seagate hard drive - perhaps that messes with some auto-backup mechanism? And of course, in case you are wondering, the missing file was gone from the mirrored drive as well.