Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I've got a Macbook OS X 10.5.8 and was working all day on a file - saving as I went along - and then at some point I restarted my computer because Skype wouldn't work. After the restart Skype worked fine but when I went to find my file it had simply disappeared. The automatic recovery failed and since then I've been trying the backup to find my file. Problem is that there is really nothing in the backup files. There is one svf temp file but I can't open it. I really don't understand what happened to my file and why there is no trace of it in my computer. Any possibility of getting this file back?

Start OpenOffice.
Under Files>Recent Documents you find a menu of recently used files.
Either you can pick the file from this menu or you get an error message that the file does not exist.

Pure Speculation: You opened a mail attachment for editing. The file was extracted out of the email to a temporary directory. Then you worked with a file in a temporary directory. Temporary directories are cleared on reboot.

Any decent email program extracts any attachment as a read-only copy to some temporary directory so you are forced to save your own working copy somewhere in your own home directory under your self chosen name.
Any decent email program has a command for viewing attachments (double-click) and another command to detach or store attachments. The former will store a temporary read-only copy for viewing whereas the latter will always prompt for a self chosen path and file name.
Same with any decent web browser. It lets you view some clicked file which gets downloaded as a read-only copy to a temporary directory or it lets you edit a file after it had been stored to a well known, warm and safe place.

no - it wasn't from an email. It was a file I'd been working on for a while - 3 weeks or so - so it's surprising that there isn't any record of it in the computer. It also isn't in the list of recent files.

When something doesn't show up in the list of recent files, it is often the case that the computer has automatically restored to an earlier saved state and overwritten the OpenOffice User Profile with the earlier version. I do not know if this happened in your case - I offer it only as a possibility. On some operating systems such action can be triggered by an internal system crash.

If you are aware of the directory in which the file was saved originally, look there outside of OpenOffice. The file may still exist there, but not be shown in OpenOffice's Recent Files.

hi shlomoarava, why don't you try Recuva app? It's free and available for Mac OS. Hope you'll find your doc or backup file.