Thanks - I thought it must have been.
I have done some tests. I have an AOO document called fred.odt. Tools > Options > OpenOffice > Paths lists the temporary folder used by AOO (Windows 7) as C:\Users\name\AppData\Local\Temp
1 Open fred.odt. This creates a folder C:\users\name\AppData\Local\Temp\sv5mruke.tmp where the "sv5mruke" is random. Note this is a folder despite ending .tmp. This folder contains a file sv5mruvn.tmp, which is a complete odt file of fred.odt as opened. Note it has a different name from the folder, but shares some initial characters. If you re-name sv5mruke.
tmp to sv5mruke.
odt, it opens as normal with Writer (and un-zips as normal).
2 Add some text to fred.odt. When I add text to fred.odt, sv5mruvn.tmp does not change.
3 Save fred.odt with its new text. Each time I save fred.odt, sv5mruvn.tmp is renamed (eg to sv5mxvk5.tmp) and it now contains the saved contents of fred.odt.
4 Close fred.odt. The sv5mxvk5.tmp file is deleted, and the folder sv5mruke.tmp is deleted.
At this stage, the only way to recover the sv5mxvk5.tmp file is to use a file recovery utility to recover deleted files. I only need to search in C:\users\name\AppData\Local\Temp and folders below it.
So it appears that if you can recover the final tmp file, it will contain the contents of Fred.odt at the last but one time it was saved. You might be lucky and recover an earlier tmp file, but I would have thought that unlikely.
Edit: I have now done some tests.
When when you create a new document, which Writer calls Untitled1, Writer creates the sv5mruke.tmp file immediately, but sv5mruke.tmp is completely empty (0 bytes long) until you manually File > Save As ... save the odt file. Meanwhile, any AutoSaves of the new, unsaved document are saved in the Backup folder as ...\Backup\Untitled_0.odt (where [see Paths] the Backup folder is at C:\Users\John\AppData\Roaming\OpenOffice\4\user\backup\). So, if you are looking for deleted temporary files for a document which you never saved, but which was AutoSaved while you were typing it, then look for deleted Untitled-0.odt files in C:\Users\John\AppData\Roaming\OpenOffice\4\user\backup\.
When you open an existing file which has already been saved before, Writer creates the sv5mruke.tmp file immediately using the contents of the "as opened" file. So, if you are looking for a deleted temporary file of a document which had been saved before you started your new edits, then look for deleted files called something like sv5mruvn.tmp in C:\users\name\AppData\Local\Temp\.
I then closed AOO and immediately used Recuva (free from http://www.piriform.com/recuva/release-notes/1.51.1063/b1/a0) to attempt to un-delete the tmp file in C:\users\name\AppData\Local\Temp\. In some cases I was completely successful - in others, the file had already been overwritten. |
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. |