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Please help with encoded text

Posted: Tue Nov 22, 2011 6:48 am
by gingertoys
Hello,

Here is the problem, my girlfriend has been working on her essay (which is due in Thursday).

She was using Open Office on her computer and the power went. When she switched it back on and checked the saved file it was changed to just a series of hashtag characters! ##################################### Quite literally five pages of this #############################

I have been googling for hours and I can't help, she is really upset and under a lot of pressure.

Here is a link to the file http://www.mediafire.com/?3xdbmyemvg3ogac

I have seen some guys say they can recover the data, and content XML files etc. It is all really just way over my head unfortunately.

If anyone can help recover this file, I would be happy to send them money for a drink over paypal or to a charity of their choice :)

Please let me know asap guys.

Cheers

Re: Please help with encoded text, Emergency! please asap

Posted: Tue Nov 22, 2011 7:24 am
by gingertoys
I forgot to mention, she had been saving it regularly. It's just no matter what we try now, it's just ################# throughout the document. No text at all, and the file was saved as some sort of Encoded Text .txt file

Cheers

Re: Please help with encoded text, Emergency! please asap

Posted: Tue Nov 22, 2011 8:57 am
by RoryOF
Little to be done, I fear. See
http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/ ... =6&t=17677

Look in the OpenOffice temporary directory and rename any files with arbitrary names to .odt and see if they open to give an earlier version of the file.

Re: Please help with encoded text

Posted: Tue Nov 22, 2011 1:19 pm
by Hagar Delest
Check indeed the temporary folder of the system (see in OOo Tools>Options>OOo>Paths). If there are folders like sgmlf.tmp with a file having the same name inside, make a copy of that file, rename it in .odt and cross your fingers.

Else, I hope she had some backups...

Re: Please help with encoded text

Posted: Tue Nov 22, 2011 4:37 pm
by Bill
You may be able to restore a previous version of the file:

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