Corruption beyond repair?

[Cheebacca]

Hello everybody!

I'm going crazy here, trying to open a .odt document, while writer keeps displaying "ASCII Filter Option" followed by the document full of "####". Now, I know this is a known issue, and I did follow the steps in the tutorial, but obtained no positive results. However, I'm really desperate and would really appreciate if someone with greater knowledge would be able to fix my problem. The events were the following:

Yesterday I finished writing (a 40-something page document) around 4 PM. Spellchecked some sentences, saved again around 9 PM and put my laptop to SLEEP. Closed the lid, load it in a car, drove home and didn't use the computer till this morning.
Today I booted my computer and upon boot got this strange popup (the one that offers you to link up the phone etc.), like I would re-install Windows or something. Honestly, didn't think too much of it and just skipped it.
Next I tried to open OO to start working, but when I opened the launcher it presented me with the UI that requests your personal data. I did fill it in (but I haven't reinstall OO or anything) and the problem described above appeared. It's just this one file, all the rest are opened without any problems. Honestly, I can't remember if I closed the document when I put the computer to sleep or not, but if I left it opened, I'm 100% that it wasn't the only .odt document opened (and again, the rest work without any problems).

Another thing (I don't know if it matters or not), when I enabled the "hidden folders view" I noticed there was a folder .~lock.<document.name>.odt# altho the document wasn't viewed/ edited in OO at that moment.

So I started troubleshooting and did the following:
1) rename my "user" folder in the roaming folder and run OO again.
2) searched old "backup" folder, just to find some random files, some from a year ago, some from few months, but not the one I was looking for.
3) created a copy of a document, renamed it to .zip -couldn't open/extract it.
4) searched the "temp" file for the .tmp folders, found one that had potential to be the file in question, and tried with the .zip method again - same result.
5) downloaded and run Recuva, found 2 .tmp files that had potential to be some older versions, but again, couldn't open them.

Now I don't know what else to do. Should I try "system restore" option on Windows? Or does that just restore the system and the documents are doomed anyways?
Could anyone help me by looking at the files? I would really appreciate the help.

Thanks for your time and help!!!

[RoryOF]

The lock file is merely housekeeping - it will have NO usable content. If the files you have found won't open with zip, there is nothing you can do. I can't say about System Restore - I suspect it may only restore the files to their state at the time the system was saved.

[John_Ha]

when I opened the launcher it presented me with the UI that requests your personal data.

That means your profile has been corrupted and a new profile has been created by AOO.

writer keeps displaying "ASCII Filter Option" followed by the document full of "####".

That means there is no user content in your file and it is completely lost.

Looking for previous versions and temporary files is your only hope but it only works if you had previously saved it. If you had never saved it then there is no way of recovering what you typed because it was only ever held in memory.

See [Tutorial] How to find and un-delete AOO temporary files for detailed instructions on how to

a) use Previous Versions (W7 and later) to recover previous versions of the file (is there something similar on MacOS and Linux?);

b) recover your file as it was when you last opened or saved it, or as it was when it was last saved with AutoRecovery;

c) find previous versions of the file in the folder it is located in, but which have since been deleted;

d) find any temporary files AOO wrote while you were editing the file but which have not yet been deleted;

e) un-delete the temporary files AOO wrote while you were editing the file, and then deleted. d) and e) will recover your file as it was when you last opened or you last saved it.

If you cannot follow the instructions ask someone with more PC skills to help you. Act quickly - the longer you wait the more likely any temporary files are to be deleted.

[Cheebacca]

@RoryOF: I think I haven't made myself clear enough. I wasn't implying that .~lock file should contain any valuable information, I was merely explaining the situation in as much depth as I could since I didn't know what exactly was relevant. In other words, I thought that maybe the document got corrupted because there was lock file present and there was some easy fix. But I guess not, right?

@John_Ha: I was working on the document for at least 2 weeks and was saving it regularly (few times a day, after every writing session) and I had Autorecovery enabled. However, I didn't find any files (of this document at least) in the backup folder. I did find it in the temp folder (and 2 additional .tmp files with Recuva scan), but, like I stated in the original post, they all seem corrupted as well. I followed all the procedures described in the tutorial you are suggesting immediately this morning, plus I later tried some solutions from other forums. Results were unfortunately null.

I guess I just learned a really costly lesson on backing up. Thank you both for your reply!
I'm running out of hope, but still, if someone can suggest any other method or something I will be most grateful.

[RoryOF]

The lock file is generated when OpenOffice opens a file, to prevent a second instance of that file being opened and edited. If two instances of the file are edited at once, as might happen in an office, OpenOffice would not know which was the master without the lock file. That it is left indicates that OpenOffice was not closed correctly.

If there are levels of inspection in Recuva, tell it to use the deepest, then go away and leave it to do its job - deep levels (if they exist) may take much time.

[Cheebacca]

If there are levels of inspection in Recuva, tell it to use the deepest, then go away and leave it to do its job - deep levels (if they exist) may take much time.

Also did that. It displayed tons of files, but I was only able to find 2 .tmp files that matched the size and the "last modified" date to be considered hits. Both of those gave negative results when I tried converting them to .zip and opening the package. They were last modified, one yesterday and the other 2 days ago. Further back no .tmp files were found.