Writer crashed after 1 hours work can i recover?

[wbutchart]

Is there any way to recover a file after open office crashes?. I spend a hour working on a file (including a load of research) and then open office crashed. it then offered to recover the file and proceeded to recover the file back to the original form BEFORE todays work.

I am so frustrated by this, i thought open office was reliable!.

[acknak]

Have you read the Forum Survival Guide?

What OS and OOo version are you using?

The current versions of OOo are set to automatically save recovery information every 15 minutes. You can check your setting under Tools > Options > Load/Save > General > Save. In theory, with that option set, the most you should lose is 15 minutes.

Even so, recovery is not always possible. If OOo went through file recovery when you restarted it, I'm afraid that's about the best you can do. In the end, it's up to you to protect your work, by doing an actual save (File > Save) on a regular basis, and keeping separate backup versions of your document at intervals (e.g. once a day).

[squenson]

wbutchart,

If you have not saved your work, I am afraid that everything is lost. On the other hand, one hour lost is not that dramatic, and let's see the silver lining of the cloud: as of now you will save your work every 10 minutes, do a backup of your file every day. In this forum (or the old one), we heard horrible stories of people losing months of work!

As far as reliability of OOo is concerned, your mileage may vary, but it is definitively something that can be improved, unfortunately the limited OOo resources have to focus their energy on new releases instead of stability.

[Hagar Delest]

If you run a not so recent version of OOo, you can try to open the original file saved on your HD (I hope you've not overwritten it with the recovered file). Sometimes, it can be a good surprise.

[foxcole]

I've had better luck with OpenOffice regarding file recovery, than with all the versions of Word I've used. Word's recovery can be a painfully manual process, one in which you hope the temporary file exists and still contains your changes.

At least with OOo, you know you can go to a .bak file that's updated with the previous document content each time you save manually... so it saves the temp file to the .bak file and creates a new temp file to receive your next changes. The more often you save, the more up-to-date the .bak file is.

No program is immune to corruptions and crashes, due to the nature of the electricity we harness and manipulate when we work with computers. What that means is no matter what program you're working in, you risk losing your work. Save often and save backup copies if you want to safeguard the content you've produced. It's the only way.

[Hagar Delest]

At least with OOo, you know you can go to a .bak file that's updated with the previous document content each time you save manually

But sadly, it's not activated by default IIRC. So new users often have to experience the data loss before activating it.

[Arthur Archnix]

But sadly, it's not activated by default IIRC. So new users often have to experience the data loss before activating it.

I just came here to look for this exact thing. I was working on a document, tried to change the spell check language, the thing hung and asked if I wanted to close the spell check window, I said yes and the whole darn program closed down.

Now, I have it supposedly auto-saving every 10 minutes, so I wasn't too worried, but when I opened up the document again, the auto-recover thing kicked in asking me if I wanted to recover the document. In MS word this is a risk free process; Word attempts to recover a file, if it can it opens it up as a temporary file and lets you choose what to save it as - either the original filename or something new, like recovered_Doc.txt. Imagine my shock and horror, when OOwriter found "recovered" my file to three hours back in time.

I was working with a co-worker. We had to spend 2 hours recreating all the work we did in the previous three hours. She was not impressed with me or Linux.

So tell me, am I using it wrong? Are there some settings I can change? Am I correct in assuming (from that one experience) that when you recover a file (or attempt to) it overwrites the file you are attempting to recover? If so, is this the sanest choice for a default behaviour, and if I happen to disagree, can I change this behaviour?

[floris v]

I don't know all ins and outs of the autosave option, but I turned it off; too much trouble and keeping me waiting because at every autosave the program blocks. Instead I hit Ctrl+S every few minutes. I learned to do that when Word was unstable and OOo on a SuSe Linux 6.x wasn't very nice either. Anyway, computers are so fast nowadays that saving often is no longer a big pain.

[Hagar Delest]

Autosave is indeed a weird beast.

In former versions, I have been able to recover the file in a state before the last manual save I noticed that once because a couple of minutes after manually saving the file I was working on, it crashed and the recovered file had less data than the one I had just saved. I could even open the last saved file in parallel with the recovered (having the 2 windows with exactly the same filenames!). So no, when the recovery process is launched, the real file is not touched until you overwrite it with the recovered file.

Had you tried to open the 'real' file on your HD? If you had manually saved periodically, you shouldn't have lost everything.

After a discussion about that with Bill few months ago, it appeared that the AutoSave feature might have been changed (at least from 2.2.1) because I couldn't reproduce the bug.

But here comes the strange thing:

There should be no recovery cycle when you restart OOo after saving a document then manually killing OOo. Recovery is necessary only if a document has been modified but not saved before OOo is killed.

There is one under my Linux box, not under Windows!

Watch your backup folder when you save a document. The autorecovery file should disappear when saving the file and not reappear until the next autorecovery save.

The autorecovery version remains sometimes

[Hagar Delest]

Hey, that's funny, look what a user just posted on the OOo mailing list (see his post here):

(...)
I had to go into Windows XP task manager and "End Now" all the "Not responding" programs, which were all the instances of OOo ... everything else was running fine.

After doing that, when I went to use OOo again, to have another go at sending my PO, the document recovery console appeared and I thought: "Yes, why not", and recovered my documents (the purchase order and two others, including my Things To Do list (TTD list)). To my shock and horror, several hours of editing had disappeared from my TTD list, and the final changes to the PO were missing also. Fortunately, I am one of those people who save frequently when editing or composing a document, so I saved my 'recovered' documents under different names and then loaded the copies I had saved under their original names, before the crash. I lost some of my editing work, but the originals were ever so much more up to date than the recovered versions which seemed to be about a week out of date.

And he's running XP

[acknak]

But here comes the strange thing:

Bill wrote:There should be no recovery cycle when you restart OOo after saving a document then manually killing OOo. Recovery is necessary only if a document has been modified but not saved before OOo is killed.

There is one under my Linux box, not under Windows!

For me (on Linux), OOo will offer to "recover" any file that is open when OOo quits abnormally, even if the file is unmodified, or never modified. Is that what you're referring to?

I understand the desire to try and protect people from losing work, but it is not possible to do this reliably for every situation.

Suppose I
1) manually save my document
2) select a large chunk of text and cut it in preparation to move it to another part of the document.

Before I finish and paste the text back into the document, the phone rings and I spend 10 minutes away from the computer. During that time,
3) OOo autosaves--with the big chunk missing--and then
4) the power goes out and the system goes down.

Which version of the document is the one to be restored? The autosave which is newer, or the older, intact, before the text was cut, version?

Maybe that's an uncommon scenario, but even so, I do not believe that an automated recovery feature such as the one OOo has can ever be completely reliable, so I try not to rely on it at all. A few times it has actually saved me some typing, when I forgot to save a document and the system went down, so it can work, I just treat it with a good deal of skepticism: unless I am sure that the "recovered" version is the best one, I always cancel the recovery and (possibly) save the recovered file somewhere temporary until I can check it out.

[Arthur Archnix]

In former versions, I have been able to recover the file in a state before the last manual save I noticed that once because a couple of minutes after manually saving the file I was working on, it crashed and the recovered file had less data than the one I had just saved. I could even open the last saved file in parallel with the recovered (having the 2 windows with exactly the same filenames!). So no, when the recovery process is launched, the real file is not touched until you overwrite it with the recovered file.

This was my situation I think. I manually killed the program and then tried to open the file. The auto-recover kicked in. I said ok try and recover it. When it said done it opened up and I looked at it. I could tell right away that it was way off; three hours of work gone, and I'd definitely saved manually at least twice in the intervening space, letting autosaves take care of the rest. Seeing that it was horribly wrong I closed it without saving, reopened the file and ... uh-oh, it's the "recovered" version. Hence, my comment/question about autorecover overwriting the file without clearing it with the user.

I'm running Ubuntu Gutsy, OO Version 2.3.0

I've changed my habits a bit since this painful lesson; for example, before opening a file after a crash copy it to a separate location. Also, before opening a file after a crash, go into the backup folders and copy those files to a temp location. At least, in theory. I've never had OO crash before, and it hasn't happened since.

[Hagar Delest]

For me (on Linux), OOo will offer to "recover" any file that is open when OOo quits abnormally, even if the file is unmodified, or never modified. Is that what you're referring to?

Yes, I think so. I should make some tests again tonight.