Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I am using Open Office 3.0.1. After nearly completing a chapter of my novel, saving after every paragraph, my computer spontaneously rebooted and when I loaded OO again, the program asked if I would like to retrieve the copy of the document in memory. I said yes. When it had finished, I got a pop up box asking me to chose the character set and default font. I selected the defaults, Western Europe Windows 1252, font Times New Roman and the language English. The document came up as nothing but hash marks. I tried opening it with different character settings but no luck. Is there any way to retrieve any of the previously saved versions? I spent a lot of time on this chapter of my novel and saved as I went thinking that I was being smart. I see that there has been some discussion of similar issues before, but not for some time, and in my initial scan of the forums I did not find a solution. I am hoping perhaps there has been more recent treatment of this issue and some solution has been found. This represents a lot of work gone.

Look in the temporary directory of OpenOffice, the path is given in /Tools /Options /OpenOffice.org Paths; if there are any files there with names such as sfgtre.tmp rename them to .odt and try to open them. Else nothing to be done, I fear, but rewrite. Experience shows that a rewrite is almost always better!

For the record: 22 page term paper replaced with pound signs.

Note that it seems there are less topics about that with latest 3.3.0 version. It may be worth upgrading.