Recovery interrupted

[jbwill84]

Apologies if this has been asked somewhere before. I searched and the closest thing I could find was http://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/vi ... ed#p237391 but the issue was never resolved to my understanding. Anyway, again sorry if this is repeat question.

Finishing up a huge document in writer and as per usual, OOo was auto saving every fifteen or twenty minutes. Either windows or OOo crashed while I took a short break. As per usual OOo prompted me to recover the document. Not per usual I got a message stating that recovery had been interrupted. The file opened anyway but with the last eight hours of work replaced with a previous draft. Is there any place I can search for the saved file and get my work back? Any help at all would be huge. If I've lost it forever I'll just have to get back to work but if there is any hope at all I'll take it.

[RoryOF]

Look in the temp directory specified in /Tools /Options /OpenOffice.org : Paths. If there are files with arbitrary names (xyzzy.tmp or similar), rename these to .odt and try to open them. With luck you may get some or all of your lost work. An eight hour session is not good news anyway. Best, when you walk away for a break, to close down the application and reopen it on your return. That way you might only have lost two or three hours work, or perhaps might not have had the crash at all.

[jbwill84]

Rory, thanks for advice. I tried searching the pathway specified but no luck on any files. I'm thinking my work is done for as the folder where the file is saved has the last update being yesterday. There is a temp file that was saved today but apparently it was saved after the crash (around eight AM my time) so none of the aforementioned work was saved. There seem to be no other temporary files of that document (or anything else) dating between those two times.

[RoryOF]

Worth starting a recovery utility (PhotoRec is often recommended) and letting it run. This may take hours, but could find a deleted temporary file (no guarantees!).

[jbwill84]

Thanks again Rory. I'll give that a go.

[Hagar Delest]

NB: in your temp folder, the file is not directly in that root folder, it's in a subfolder. If one of these subfolders has a file that has the same name than this subfolder, then rename that .tmp file it to .odt.

What is the time stamp of the last saved file? Did you often manually save?