Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

First of all, I KNOW to save documents right away but for some reason I didn't today, and I can't find that there is an auto recovery of an unsaved file. Is there? I've always used MS Office Word, and am just learning Open Office, which I have loved so far, until this happened today! I can't even remember what happened to try to attempt to tell, but I was still typing the document and all at once got a pop-up as whether to recover files. The ones that showed were old files that had been saved, and then next thing the one I was working on was gone...??? I wish I could recall exactly what the box said, but I'm sorry I don't. I've looked on here for old questions and answers for my problem but not finding anything for a simple text document.

The auto-recovery protocols used by Open Office require that the file have been saved, manually or via the auto-save function, at least once.
At this point my suggestion, and I hope you haven't used your computer much, is to download & install Recuva, then use it to try to recover any files in your temp directory.

See [Tutorial] How to find and un-delete Writer temporary files for an explanation of why you will not be able to recover your file because you never saved it to disk.

If you had saved it to disk, or used AutoRecovery and/or Save a backup file, the instructions tell you how to identify these files, and also how to un-delete the temporary files Writer wrote while you were editing the file, and then deleted. You should be able to recover your file as it was when you last opened or saved it, or as it was when it was last saved with AutoRecovery.

Had you saved it, you may also find previous versions of the file in the folder it is located in, but which have since been deleted.