Lost document, pound/hash symbol

[AntSquirly]

For the past few months, I have been re-writing a story. This past Friday I minimized my window and went off to bed. The next morning when I went to open it the icon was gone at the bottom so I figured my computer had shut down and rebooted after an update of some sort. I went to retrieve my document and when I opened it up all I had was pages of pound/hash tag symbols. Is there a way to get these back? Because the usual retrieval method wasn't even there.

I'm techno dumb so any advice you could give will have to be at neophyte level.
Thank You.



Title Edited. A descriptive title for posts helps others who are searching for solutions and increases the chances of a reply (Hagar, Moderator).

[RoryOF]

Your best hope of recovery is to try and undelete any temporary file OpenOffice was using. As soon as possible do the following:

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 any existing but deleted files and prevent their recovery. There is no guarantee that you will recover anything useful.

Or use a backup - your existing file with the ###s is corrupt beyond recovery

[Hagar Delest]

See: [Tutorial] The Dreaded Pound Signs: file reduced to ####.
Good luck.

I hope you had backups.

[AntSquirly]

Yeah, I do have backup, an external, but I had written a page and a half of NEW story to flesh out a scene, saved it then went to bed.

What could go wrong? (yeah, I know)

[Hagar Delest]

What could go wrong? (yeah, I know)

I wish we knew!

Nobody has managed so far to find out.
The way AOO closes is highly suspected, especially when data are buffered before being written to the disk.
What remains is that at least the original file (not the latest saved but the one you open last) should not be wrecked. I think that the save process is not safe enough. The new file should replace the former one only once the system has checked that everything went fine.

[John_Ha]

See [Tutorial] How to find and un-delete Writer temporary files for instructions on how to identify and un-delete the temporary files Writer wrote while you were editing the file, and then deleted. You should be able to recover your file as it was when you last opened it or as it was when it was last saved with AutoRecovery.

You may also find previous versions of the file in the folder it is located in, but which have since been deleted.

[AntSquirly]

Thanks, John but I think I'm already dead in the water. I had to hard boot because my computer wouldn't respond because of more incoming.

[John_Ha]

It is still worth a try. The deleted files will eventually get overwritten so the sooner you do it, the more chance you have of catching them before they get overwritten.