Textedit crashed and lost a previously saved file I have a file I created and edited with textedit.  I saved the file many many times.  Textedit crashed and I rebooted and the file it entirely gone.

What happened?
Is there a way to recover it?



A bit more background on the problem and my machine:
I have a macbook air; it's 2.5 years old and has OSX 10.9.5.
It has recently had another issue which I haven't been able to diagnose:
The hard drive is frequently filling up after a few hours or days without a reboot, and no new downloads of more than a few MBs.  After I reboot, some, but not all, of the space is recovered.
Since I began having that issue, I've deleted 10+ GB of data over the course of a few weeks, and yet my hard-drive has less space available than it used to.

The crash happened when I had recently received a warning about my start-up disk being full and had only ~200MB remaining available space, according to Finder.
Have you tried looking at File > Open Recent menu item in TextEdit?

Next you can use spotlight to search for the file name or any word in the document. Lastly, look for time machine either local or  external backups.