[Solved] Open Office Crashed need help recovering a file

[Knives]

Worked on this document for 8 hours, start inserting the final chart. open office crashes and closes it self. recover file pops up but than im told cannot recover file because file is read only? open office loads up a really old verison of the file.... 8 hours of work lost.

What can I do to recover the file since the file recovery did not work? doesn't open office auto save every hour or every second like google docs or something? can't seem to find the auto save folder or the recovery folder.

[RusselB]

OpenOffice auto save only saves if it is turned on and saves according to the settings that you specify or defaults if you haven't specified.
As to finding the backup file, you can try looking in the back-up directory, as listed under Tools -> Options -> OpenOffice -> Paths
Look in the directories listed for Backups and/or Temporary files

[Knives]

Tools does not have an options menu?

[RusselB]

Ooops.. you're using a Mac. The settings are there, just in a different location. Not having a Mac I can't instruct you as to how to get to them.. they may even be called something different.

[Knives]

everyone in online support forums is saying to go to application support than click on open office but there isn't even an open office folder? so confusing.

[Knives]

man times like this I wish I was using windows. because getting support on a mac seems a lot more difficult and youd think a windows pc power user could easily use a mac. not really its actually pretty difficult. well this is what I get for not using google docs which saves every second. can't believe its this difficult. already spent hours looking online.

[RusselB]

Nothing stopping you from using Google docs. I'm just at an impasse due to not knowing the configuration of OO for Macs.

[Knives]

am I posting in the right area? are there any mac users who can help?

[RusselB]

This is the right area, but at the moment it appears there aren't any Mac users (that I recognize) online.
You have to be a bit patient. This isn't one-on-one live support.

[Knives]

I FIGURED IT OUT. OMG I HAVE MY SAVED FILES OK FALLOW THIS GUIDE IF YOUR ON A MAC WITH YOSEMITE.
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after spending countless hours being super annoyed and angry at open office wondering why i wasn't using google docs. it turns out it really did create a back up.
BUT.... not in the back up area you would expect most of the time its placed in a back up folder within user but. there are other random folders youll need to look through to find it.
I used this page to find the folder you need.

viewtopic.php?f=74&t=12426
If your on a mac it will most likely tell you search through these files:
For Mac users:
/Users/<user name>/Library/Application Support/OpenOffice/4/user or /Users/<user name>/Library/Application Support/OpenOffice.org/3/user

than there is another problem normally you wont be able to see the files that you need so youll have to use this command in terminal to allow your self to see hidden files:

How to show hidden files in Finder on OS X "viewtopic.php?f=74&t=12426"
If you use OS X 10.9 Mavericks or OS X 10.10 Yosemite, follow these steps to show hidden files in Finder:

1) Launch Terminal.

2) Copy/paste or type in the following command

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -boolean true ; killall Finder

Now files that are hidden are a light shade of grey access user/temp/svk11yiq.tmp and within this folder your file should be there mine was called 0.odt.

[RusselB]

Excellent news, and thanks for sharing the detailed steps.

[icerabbit]

Well that's great news and thanks for sharing back how you solved it.

Searching for changed files of the day is a bit of an admin trick that may undo the damage, at least partially, to the last auto-save point, depending on save preferences.
(used to be more with mixed results, often that all you got was nothing, or plain text among formatting garbage)

Side note. This goes back a few decades, with the start of the typewriter - computer transition, before we had auto-save, but it still applies, because you still can't 100% trust the software will have your back, or will cover the last 5-10 min which may have had some important revisions. Anyway. After I was called upon a few times to (try to) recover lost end user files due to crashes, log outs, power outages, etc; I made it a point when I started instructing computer use and new software, to always tell people to hit save whenever they paused to review something else, look something up, gather their thoughts, answer the phone, before they hit print (print BSOD anyone?!), left their desk for anything, went to get coffee, walked out for a smoke, left for lunch, etc. Hit Save. Lock in your changes, people. Don't wait a half hour, hour, whole day. Give the document a name a few minutes after you start and then save frequently if you care about not losing data. Don't trust the computer. If you stop typing for a while, then HIT SAVE. To this day it is still something I practice myself and sometimes need to tell other users when I see several page long "untitled-nn" documents. And it is a bit of similar thing with versioning and then backups. System/hdd/flash drive gets dropped off in a panic ... "my files ..." When is the last time you made an extra copy or did a backup? ... crickets ...

Anyway. Great to hear you recovered the data. Practice saving