I appreciate the thought.
Tried everything I could think of including using the Monitor program to force recognition of the disk drive. Then i called my nephew who worked at Apple and he also suggested the tape approach but didn't think it would work because the likelyhood was the computer had developed a heat related problem from running for twelve hours. . . a I/O chip had become unseated and that was why the floppy was not being accessed and that chip also was involved in translating the program to the audio. He told me exactly what the problem was when the Apple ][s lost their connection to an already connected disk drive: Loose chip on the mother board. Turned out he was right. He swore me to secrecy and then told me the easy fix was to drop the computer from about four inches which gravity reseated the chips. LOL! Still couldn't save the program because reseating would likely restart the computer. . . and it was NOT a good idea to try the fix with the computer running. Bye-bye work.
That was so secret I didn't know that! That was a solution for Apple III computers, because they got so hot that the chips would unseat - metal case and no fan. Computers were more hands-on back then and I miss that. One time I pulled and inserted another board, and to my horror saw that I hadn't first powered down the machine; but to no ill effect (lucky). One thing I did have was an interface between my Apple II and my PC, so I could save data between them. I was using the Apple II at my job and needed to pass data to the PC which had an IRMA board talking to the mainframe.
I've also lost programs, mostly on PCs that froze up. Happened to all computer users!