Accidentally deleted! does open office have a trash bin?

[fionahoneynono]

i accidentally deleted my brief to the judge for my next court day on fri, that took me days to write! i've spent much of yesterday, looking for it. it was on openoffice, so its not in recycle bin. when asked if i wanted to save or discard the changes, i clicked discard--meaning, discard the changes, not the document. 5 pages!!!

does open office have a recycling bin, or trash--from which i can retrieve my doc? it should! please, somebody give it to me straight...is my doc lost? totally kaput? i tried system restore pphhttt nada! Please help!

[thomasjk]

No trash bin but Windows Vista has a Recycle Bin which is where deleted files go. Look on the Desktop for Recycle Bin. Right click and select Open, then find your file and right click and select Restore.

[Bill]

i accidentally deleted my brief to the judge for my next court day on fri, that took me days to write! i've spent much of yesterday, looking for it. it was on openoffice, so its not in recycle bin. when asked if i wanted to save or discard the changes, i clicked discard--meaning, discard the changes, not the document. 5 pages!!!

does open office have a recycling bin, or trash--from which i can retrieve my doc? it should! please, somebody give it to me straight...is my doc lost? totally kaput? i tried system restore pphhttt :P nada! pleaaaaaaaaaaaaase help!

Did you ever save the document? When you click Discard, changes since the last time a docment was saved are discarded, so if the document was never saved, then discard basically DOES mean discard the document.

[fionahoneynono]

i thank you two kindly. the recycling bin is the first place i looked. all i saw here was a discarded skype shortcut. bill this is what i was afraid of. this is what i'm presently reading on youtube: "what is ODT? open office writer maintains ODT open document text file for documents authored within it.''

this gives me hope that my document is retrievable, thru some recovery process. yes, bill? anyone? please. thanks.

[surv1v0r]

ODT is the file extension (type) for Open Document Text files.

I suspect that if you have used Windows System Restore, you may have done more damage than good.

Personal bitter experience had taught me that whenever you think you have lost data, you should ALWAYS stop and research very carefully, ideally on a different machine before doing anything - sadly virtually nobody EVER does.


Not that it will help on this occasion, if I am working on a large or important document, I tend always to save interim copies with an incrementing filename (e.g. Brief01, Brief02, Brief03, etc.). When you are happy with your final version, you can back it up to an external device and then delete the interim copies. I also make a point of shutting down the program every hour or so and if my document is really, really important (a very rare occurrence), I also reboot the PC.

[Hagar Delest]

You can try the shadow copies, here are the 2 links usually given by Bill here:
- Recover Files with Shadow Copies on Any Version of Windows Vista
- ShadowExplorer

Had you saved the file as asked by Bill? There are recovery tools but we need to know if the file had been saved first. If it has not been saved, then there is absolutely nothing to do.
Indeed, ODT is the native format for Apace OpenOffice (and OOo).

[Marklee66]

If you cannot find it in recycle bin, you may deleted them by “Shift+delete” or you may empty your recycle bin.

Even you emptied your recycle bin, you can still recover files from emptied recycle bin with data recovery software.

[commercial link deactivated: http://www.dr-fone.com/articles/recover-files-from-emptied-recycle-bin-windows.html]

but remember, do not put any new data to your recycle bin in case the data overwritten.

[nomnex]

If took you days, I assume the document was saved on your file system. To avoid the same happening again:

Always create backup copy

Tools > Preferences > Save/Load > General > Always create backup copy

Saves the previous version of a document as a backup copy whenever you save a document. Every time LibreOffice creates a backup copy, the previous backup copy is replaced. The backup copy gets the extension .BAK.
To change the location of the backup copy, choose Tools - Options - LibreOffice - Paths, and then enter a new path for the backup file.

As for recovery software, I hope that your volume is not encrypted.

[kooltay]

If it's too much for you, then stop using the computer and take it to a local computer specialist and explain the problem, they will use Data Recovery that will read all the bits on the drive and give it to you on a external hard drive for you to pick through to recover your deleted files.

[Tusion26]

If it's too much for you, then stop using the computer and take it to a local computer specialist and explain the problem, they will use Data Recovery for mac that will read all the bits on the drive and give it to you on a external hard drive for you to pick through to recover your deleted data.

When files are "deleted" they are not actually removed from your iPhone, until something else overwrites them. So by saving anything else to them you may have overwritten them. There is a decent chance that you can restore them though. I've successfully used undeleted plus before to restore data that were accidentally deleted on my iPhone.

[John_Ha]

Deleted files are not deleted - they are marked as "available for use". So it would be worth using the free Recuva to look for the deleted file (best), or the deleted temporary "work in progress" files (less likely to succeed). The longer you delay, the more you use your PC, and the more often you power it off/on, the more chance you have of overwriting the deleted files. If you have an SSD disk, you have to be very quick, as SSD disks clean up "deleted" files and they are lost for ever.

To look for the deleted file

First look in the Recycle bin because if you deleted it (as opposed to Writer deleting it - when a program deletes a file it does not go into the Recycle bin), it should be there. If not, search for it using Recuva as below ...

To look for the temporary "work in progress" files

Edit: See Using Recuva to un-delete Writer temporary files for help recovering the temporary files which Writer wrote while you were editing the document, and then deleted when Writer was closed. The post has been extensively updated [June 2016] to show how AutoRecovery files can be un-deleted for .odt files; for files which have never been saved; and for .doc files.

If you were saving your file as a .odt file, then Tools > Options > OpenOffice > Paths. Look for the temporary files path - mine is C:\Users\John\AppData\Local\Temp. You may need to switch on See hidden files by Start > Control panel > Folder options > View > Show hidden files and folders.

When Writer opens a .odt file, it places a copy of the .odt in C:\Users\John\AppData\Local\Temp. Writer first creates a folder called some random name like sv2s82l3.tmp, and inside that folder it creates a file called something like sv2s86ky.tmp. If you have images in the document, they are also stored as .tmp files here. When Writer closes, it deletes these files, but they do not go to the Recycle bin.

Folder created by Writer in which temporary files are stored

Temporary file created by Writer

You need to use Recuva to try and un-delete any of these sv2s86ky.tmp files. They are actually .odt files - rename them to .odt and they will open. This is a tmp file unzipped to show it is actually a .odt file. If you have multiple .tmp files in the folder, the otheres are images flushed from memory. Occasionally there may be a strange file - its first characters are GRF or something similar - don't know what it is, but it has no useful information for ecovering the deleted file.

sv2s82l3.tmp file unzipped to show it is an odt file

You only need the content.xml file, so even if the .tmp file is damaged because some blocks have been overwritten, you might still be able to recover just the content.xml after you have fixed the file. Do this by renaming sv2s86ky.tmp to sv2s86ky.ZIP and using one of the free ZIP fix utilities. Extract content.xml and open it with a text editor - you will need to search for your text and delete all the XML markup. I use the free Notepad ++ with the XML Tools plugin to "pretty print"B the file. You can also view it with a browser like Firerfox.

[protomik]

I have the same issue with the OP but on a linux box. How to do that with Linux? OK, I did find the answer for myself to [url=http://www.androidphonesoft.com/resources/recover-deleted-contacts-messages-lg-g3.html]recover deleted files[/url] on Linux or Android based devices.

[John_Ha]

I don't use Linux, but the basis is

1 Tools > Options > OpenOffice > Paths. Find out what path you are using for Temp
2 Visit ...\Temp with an un-delete file utilityr, and see if there are any files which can be un-deleted.

It might help to visit ...\Temp and while there, open a .odt file. You should see the temporary folder being created, and you should see the temporary files inside the folder. This will tell you what the folder and file names klook like.

Please post some example folder and file names so we know what they are in Linux.

[John_Ha]

does open office have a recycling bin, or trash--from which i can retrieve my doc? it should!

Yes (well, almost) ... but you need to switch it on.

Go Tools > Options > Load/Save ..., and you can switch on Create a backup copy, which saves the file as it was when you opened it (ie the previous version of the file) in the Backup folder specified in Tools > Options > OpenOffice > Paths > Backup. Fred.odt is saved as fred.bak.

[droider]

You can try to recover your Office documents using Photorec for Linux. Hope it helps!