ODS File corrupted unable to open

[sinjas]

Dear Experts, I am having trouble in opening my years of work in openoffice calc, I have even bought recovery tool (sysinfo ods recovery) to repair the file but failed. It was only able to recover very little content.

Backup was not enabled and i didnt have cloud previously.

I have tried every single suggestions from this forum but as i am not a very technical person having so much difficulties and spent a day trying to resolve this. You guys are my last resort.

Would appreciate if anyone could help. Thank you in advance. Here attached my corrupted file if anyone could help ~

[RoryOF]

Your file is utterly corrupted, perhaps because of system or program crash, or over-hasty closure of the computer before the file has been written to disk. The best method of recovery is set out in
[Tutorial] How to find and un-delete AOO temporary files for detailed instructions on how to

a) use Previous Versions (W7 and later) to recover previous versions of the file (is there something similar on MacOS and Linux?);

b) recover your file as it was when you last opened or saved it, or as it was when it was last saved with AutoRecovery;

c) find previous versions of the file in the folder it is located in, but which have since been deleted;

d) find any temporary files AOO wrote while you were editing the file but which have not yet been deleted;

e) un-delete the temporary files AOO wrote while you were editing the file, and then deleted. d) and e) will recover your file as it was when you last opened or you last saved it.

If you cannot follow the instructions ask someone with more PC skills to help you. Act quickly - the longer you wait the more likely any temporary files are to be deleted.

[John_Ha]

Analysis of the file suggests the .ods has been truncated. Some of content.xml appears to have written but not all of it and consequently content.xml is reported as 0 Bytes long. No user data is recoverable from what was written.

I suggest therefore that the PC was shut down before the file had been fully written, or the PC crashed before the Windows write buffer had been flushed.

In the Tutorial, follow the instructions for recovering .odt files.

[sinjas]

Thank you both, in fact I have tried every step suggested, under temp all I see is .tmp , not a single file is with .back and .aoo changing it to zip doesn’t help.

Very unfortunate all my friends are non techs, I am trying every possible way to learn in how to recover this file.

Thanks for your suggestion, I will try to look into this further with the odt suggestion.

If you have any other ideas, pls let me know

[RoryOF]

At Windows level (i.e., not in OpenOffice) change the .tmp file to .ods and see what you get.

[sinjas]

I can do that, will try thanks

[RoryOF]

Start with the most recent and work backwards to the older; you may be lucky.

[sinjas]

May I check if the temp file is under “user -> app data” or it’s under open office please ? I tired under user -> app data but none of the files work if I change it to .ods

[cwolan]

As stated above the file is corrupted and some data lost.

@sinjas
Does the file I attached contain anything useful?

[John_Ha]

Does the file I attached contain anything useful?

@cwolan

How did you do that? content.xml seems truncated to me but I do not know how to extract the bit which is there. The .ods file is 32kB but only 10kB is reported in the file suggesting that about 22kB of content.xml was written. The packed size of your content.xml is 21.6kB.

Did you use a ZIP repair utility? I tried with 7-ZIP, Yodot, ZIP2Fix and DiskInternals Zip Repair 1.1 but couldn't recover anything of content.xml.

[sinjas]

thanks cwload, its usful but i am still missing 3 tabs which are the most recent years, the sheets basically indicates numbers from 2017 -2021. I have now 2017, 2018.

[John_Ha]

i am still missing 3 tabs which are the most recent years ...

That figures. I guess 2017 was sheet 1 and 2018 was sheet 2. The file stopped being written while sheet 2 was being written and sheets 3, 4 and 5 did not get written.

[sinjas]

i have found a temp file which looks convincing but i am not able to get it to anything meaningful, and it's 46,852KB i am not able to post it here to seek for help.

[RoryOF]

What does it do when you attempt to open it?

[sinjas]

Hi RoryOF, no matter which fonts i select, the info pop up in the bottom are showing as symbols.

[RoryOF]

Rename it to type .zip and try with your system archiver. If you get a list of folders, then perhaps something can be done by way of rescue.

[RoryOF]

This may be a signature file from your antivirus, in which case it is spurious (as far as OpenOffice is concerned).

[cwolan]

I apologize for a delayed response.

thanks cwload, its usful but i am still missing 3 tabs (...)

I didn't expect much if anything, as the original file was corrupted.


@John_Ha
No kind of magic whatsoever on my part. Once on the French forum I came across a tool (utility) to repair corrupted ODF files.

post "Utilitaire de réparation de fichier ODF"
https://forum.openoffice.org/fr/forum/v ... 26&t=60992

The manual is in French ("tutoriel_reparation_ODF.pdf") so is the language of UI but the program is easy to use.
I never found the time to test it thorougly.

executable: ODFRepar.jar
The utility - in steps - analyses the corrupted file, extracts what can be extracted and then allows to write the result also as ODF file.

I tried to open the "repaired" file in AOO. AOO kindly offered to repair it. The resulting .ods file I attached to my post.

So as I pointed out: no kind of magic whatsoever on my part

[John_Ha]

@John_Ha
No kind of magic whatsoever on my part. Once on the French forum I came across a tool (utility) to repair corrupted ODF files.

Many thanks.

Your finding it was the magic part. I will add it to my Tutorial as it is an incredibly useful tool.

[cwolan]

I wrote:

The manual is in French ("tutoriel_reparation_ODF.pdf") so is the language of UI (...).

Regarding the UI language that's not entirely true.
I should have read the Manual more attentively prior to posting inadequate information...

The Manual "Utilitaire de réparation de fichiers ODF" on page 14 [1] states that:

1. As of the version 1.0.4 the program is bilingual (French, English)
   On systems with English settings the language is English, on all other systems - French.
2. As of the version 1.0.5 the program is trilingual ((French, English, Italian).
3. Changes were made to facilitate the addition of new languages without the need to recompile
4. UI language can be forced.

For example to force English in UI one uses:

java -jar {path to the folder with executable}/ODFRepar.jar en

Because my locale is pl (Polish), the program chooses the default language i.e. French but I can switch to English.

Just for the sake of argument I did - based on the information in the point 3. above - a little tinkering on the file "ODFRepar.jar" (hopefully the autor of the program - Scrat - won't mind it). Now the program runs on my system in my language.

In conclusion, should someone desire to have the program in one's native language (not French, English or Italian), a set of files should be added (cf. [2]) and the license respected.

References:

[1] file "tutoriel_reparation_ODF.pdf"
available in topic "Utilitaire de réparation de fichier ODF"
https://forum.openoffice.org/fr/forum/v ... 26&t=60992

[2] post on the Italian forum
"Utilità per riparare file corrotti (ASCII, ###, ...)"
https://forum.openoffice.org/it/forum/v ... 37&p=61967

[Hagar Delest]

Your finding it was the magic part. I will add it to my Tutorial as it is an incredibly useful tool.

For the record, I had made a tutorial for that utility: [Tutorial] ODF repair tool (MAY-2020).