Saved work lost on crash

[AlexTheGreat]

This is a weird situation, that I've never come across before.

I recently reformatted my wife's laptop, installing Windows 7 and updating fully. I also installed OpenOffice (newest version) and all of this happened less than a week ago. Anyways, she was working on her project, saved it last night and it was all fine. Today, she opened it up and continued working on it, saving frequently. OpenOffice crashed and began the recovery process, at which point it stopped responding. She re-opened her work to continue where she left off and found that the document had reverted to before her saving last night. At this point, I took a look and Ended the Process for the recovery process and began it again. It claimed to recover 3/4 documents (the odd one out didn't matter), and yet the important document was still left as it was longer than 24 hours previous. I took a look at the backup folder through the C drive, but it was empty.

She's just decided to recreate the work, but I'm just baffled by the process. I've never heard of a computer overwriting the most recent save with something from further than 24 hours previous. I'm used to dealing with corrupted files, or unsaved work being lost, or those type of issues, but the file wasn't corrupt, and it was saved frequently. Around every 15 minutes or so. Is there any explanation for this behaviour, or way to prevent it so it doesn't happen again?

Thanks for any insight or help.

[Hagar Delest]

Hi and welcome to the forum!

Well, there are very few topics about that in this forum but it's not the first time.
Have you checked the backup folder in your profile? See [Tutorial] The OpenOffice User Profile.

[thomasjk]

After the dust clears she needs to have a backup plan in place other than that built into AOO.

[AlexTheGreat]

@Hagar: Yes, I did check the backup folder. However it was empty.

@Tom: That is a weird comment considering the issue. We don't rely on AOO backup to make sure we keep the work. I'm confused how frequent saving is just discounted by the program in the event of a crash. Even if the program crashed, and closed out like most others (where you lose any unsaved data) the document would've been perfectly fine. Maybe lost a paragraph rather than everything that mattered.

Thank you for your help! I'm just trying to understand how it can happen. It seems like a rather large bug/flaw/issue and worrisome that frequent saving doesn't necessarily "save" your information. The program treated it as if there was no saving at all.

[thomasjk]

Not weird at all. I backup my entire hard drive on two machines each night. I can recover easily from the failure you described simply by restoring the file from the backup. I agree that the issue shouldn't occur but that does not negate the need for a backup plan outside of AOO.

[acknak]

"Frequent saves" may not be the best strategy, especially for OO. The safest approach is saving to a different file.

My guess as to how a problem like yours can happen is that saving a document in OO is a complex process and it takes time and system resources. If anything goes wrong during a save, then the document file being saved to can be incomplete, damaged or even lost entirely. If you're saving to a new file name, then the worst that can happen is that the new work going into the new file gets lost. The previous work is still safe in a file that is not open or in use at all.

It's also a better habit (in my opinion) to be aware of what you're doing and saving when some significant changes are finished, rather than just reflexively hitting the save button.

[Hagar Delest]

BTW, by often save, do you mean with Ctrl+S or with the save icon? Or automatic save (that is not a real save in fact but only a temporary one in case of crash)?

Note that I experienced this also once with a 2.x verison of AOO on a GNU/Linux distro. Even if I never experienced this on any Windows system (using it at work everyday), I also think that there are some corner case situations when the save operation is not that robust (the hash problem for example).

[AlexTheGreat]

@Hagar: She used the Save icon. The auto-save is nice, but we don't rely on it.

@acknak: I agree, it is a better habit. However people are lazy and can barely be bothered to name the file correctly the first time around, let alone make multiple versions. I can understand making multiple saves for large-scale projects (thesis, book, etc.) but for basic, everyday tasks for the typical user, I'm not sure it's the best use of time. In my wife's case, it set her back about 2 hours, which is frustrating but not destroying. Spending those extra 2 hours redoing the work is likely less time than manually saving new files each time for however long my experience with AOO has been (since this is the first time I've ever come across it). Similar principle to extended warranties.

I guess for me, I could understand it better if the file had become corrupted/unopenable/blank/everything hashes better than it "time traveling". The only solution I can think of, is that the Day 1 version was set as a backup in AOO, and upon crash it used that backup version and overwrote the actual saved version.