Corrupt .ods File on Mac - Cannot Open

[BangersandCash]

Please help!

I have read many posts in here about zipping and such but I am just not the best at this stuff.

I really hope someone can help me recover the content. The file is attached!

Thanks!

[John_Ha]

Welcome to the forum

I have bad news - your file is damaged beyond repair and all spreadsheet content has been lost. The only thing recoverable is the thumbnail image - and it's the only thing you don't care about.

I did the following

1 Attempt to open it with 7-ZIP. 7-Zip said it could not open it

2 Attempt to open it with PKZIP. PKZIP said the file was damaged and offered to repair it. I opened the repaired file and it only had the following data in it.

Contents of repaired odt file

Only the PNG thumbnail file was recoverable. The critical file - content.xml - was zero size.

The file has been damaged for unknown reasons and I guess it is much smaller than the original suggesting that some of the file has been lost.

Edit: I wrote this assuming you are on Windows, not Mac. You should be able to do it on a Mac - you just need to find a zip utility and an un-delete tool which works on Macs. Alternatively, if your disk is easily accessible, you could remove the disk and ask someone with a Windows machine to connect the disk and do the work.

If it is really important to you your only option is to cross your fingers, and hope that you might be able to un-delete an older version of the file, either an ods you deleted intentionally; or a temporary file AOO was using while you had the file open.

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.

1 Download Recuva, a free file recover utility

2 In AOO, Tools > Options > OpenOffice > Paths and note which path AOO uses for temporary files. You are going to try and un-delete some, hoping that they have not yet been overwritten. My path (W7) is "C:\Users\John\AppData\Local\Temp". The AOO files you are looking for are named something like "C:\Users\John\AppData\Local\Temp\svgzeix.tmp\svh0m72.tmp."

First, see if Recuva can find any deleted .ods files - Start Recuva and use the wizard to search for .ods files. If you find any, write them to a USB memory stick so that you don't run the risk of overwriting some of them on the disk with otherss.

Second, see if Recuva can find any files in C:\Users\John\AppData\Local\Temp. You are only interested in files of the form svgzeix.tmp\svh0m72.tmp as these are the AOO files. Undelete any that you can. Rename them svh0m72.ods and try to open them. If it cannot, try to open them with a ZIP utility. If you are really desperate, let Recuva do a deep scan - it will take a while.

Nothing I have told you does any damage to your system and Recuva should do no damage but it is always worth while backing up a disk before doing something like this.

Third, arrange to run a daily incremental backup (so that changed files are backed up each day) so you could have retrieved yesterdays file.

There are other posts on undeleting files in the Writer forum - search on Recuva will retrieve some, but not all of them.

Good luck!

[BangersandCash]

Thank you for your help John_Ha. I am on an iMac and DO NOT have access to a PC computer hence my plead here. I have tried to find alternative programs to do the same things you wrote of but with no such luck. I am hoping someone on here could've helped me. Thanks to those who tried.