Document Opening Fail

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Anechidna
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Document Opening Fail

Post by Anechidna »

I have had this experience a few times now and am not fully sure why it only impacts this document so have taken to printing a hard copyeach week.

Windows 10 has just updated again and on starting up OO to access my reference file of passwords, OO It comes back with a request for ascii options, clicking Ok returns a document of three pages of ######, instead of a 15 page document.

The annoying thing is that it is just this file no other file, it is a standard Open Office text document with three or four short lines of text per entry with standard CR & LF options

Would appreciate any thoughts as to what is possibly happening.

Anechidna
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acknak
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Re: Document Opening Fail

Post by acknak »

Greetings and welcome to the community forum!

The "all #s" situation usually indicates that the document file is damaged.

Are you saving to some kind of removable media? A USB stick or media card?

Perhaps you're working on a laptop?

These are the two situations that most often lead to the problem.
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RoryOF
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Re: Document Opening Fail

Post by RoryOF »

Your file is most probably lost, possibly due to over hasty close down of the computer before all housekeeping was complete.

To try and recover your file, you should look in the backup and temporary directories pointed to by /Tools /Options /OpenOffice : Paths. Rename any files in those to type .odt and see if they contain your data. Download Recuva or PhotoRec (only one needed) and let it do an indepth recovery of deleted files on your computer. You may get a file containing some or all of your data (or not). Do this as a first priority; other use of the computer may overwrite and existing but deleted files and prevent their recovery. There is no guarantee that you will recover anything useful.
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Anechidna
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Re: Document Opening Fail

Post by Anechidna »

Thanks.

Yes I had clicked the top right to close but hadn't saved and it asked if I wished to save naturally I did.

That would explain why it happens more frequently than any other file as it is always open and being referenced.
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Anechidna
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Re: Document Opening Fail

Post by Anechidna »

Laptop.

Will take greater care from now on to not push the shutdown process.

Thanks issue solved
Last edited by Anechidna on Mon May 16, 2016 2:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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RoryOF
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Re: Document Opening Fail

Post by RoryOF »

I always advise a little patience with file closing/reopening/computer_shutdown. Look at the disk activity light on a computer. After you have told it to power off, there may be a short pause (a second or two) and then a burst of disk activity as the computer's write buffers are flushed. There may then be some internal activity in the disk drive as its internal buffers are flushed. All told, not long, but five or ten seconds will normally cover this. The few extra seconds taken (and they are only a few) will be a lot less than the time taken to recover or rebuild a damaged file.
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acknak
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Re: Document Opening Fail

Post by acknak »

Anechidna wrote:... I had clicked the top right to close but hadn't saved and it asked if I wished to save naturally I did. ...
So is this the "X" at the top right of the OpenOffice window? Or something else?

I do this all the time (close OO, get prompted to save the file, OK, ...) and never lose a file. There should not be a problem shutting down OO like this.

Shutting down the whole computer MAY be, but it depends on exactly how you do the shutdown.
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RoryOF
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Re: Document Opening Fail

Post by RoryOF »

Sometimes it can happen that a file closedown, instantly followed by a reopen of the file because you have forgotten something you meant to insert, can cause serious file damage. Very rare, but I have seen it happen, particularly with large files that take several seconds to write.
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acknak
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Re: Document Opening Fail

Post by acknak »

I've not run into that. When I close a file and confirm a save, the window is unresponsive until the save is complete. I wouldn't know how to re-open the file before the save operation finishes.
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RoryOF
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Re: Document Opening Fail

Post by RoryOF »

I'm actually thinking of a restart as another process during the lockout time after the Save process appears to finish.-
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Anechidna
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Re: Document Opening Fail

Post by Anechidna »

acknak, Yes the X in the top right.

I was closing applications down in order to shut the Laptop down and restart. I felt it was getting hot and it had been running for a few days. I originally had just selected OO from the bottom toolbar and clicked to close it. If I don't do that OO on restarting goes through the recovery process. Never lost a document that way, but have noticed this problem occurs when W10 updates. Not sure why this file as it is a text file like any other WP document.
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Anechidna
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Re: Document Opening Fail

Post by Anechidna »

RoryOF Yes I am aware of the lag time when shutting files. I had moved on to closing down Google which I found was not responding.

This specific OO document is open all the time as I refer to it for the passwords. Tried various Pswd managers and all are less than satisfactory, I have around 80 and all are around 16characters in size and a mix of alphanumerics and special characters with no rhyme nor reason, hence the importance of this document, I am still recovering from the last incidence three months ago.

I suppose if I wrote a macro that generated an additional copy each time I saved the file and gave it the filename plus date and time of save as part of the file name would cover instances such as this, I would only loose one update to the file.
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