[Hint] How did I fix my ODT file

[RoryOF]

Try the attached. The problem was one Comment which seemed to be repeated three times. I removed two of the repeats, but cannot now see the remaining comment.

Edit: File deleted for confidentiality

[Blazej_Zych]

Try the attached. The problem was one Comment which seemed to be repeated three times. I removed two of the repeats, but cannot now see the remaining comment.

Great!!! thank you very much!! it works properly. Can you make me a favour and delete repaired file from here? There is private data...

[agusia]

Thank you keme for your advice. Actually, one of the functions of omega t is to be able to keep the styles from the original "source" document and apply them automatically to the translated, "target" document. So with omega t i can see a lot of tags along the text but I'm not really able to - and I shouldn't, for the purpose of having an already properly formatted translated text - modify or delete them. An error probably occurred somewhere along the way, though, and this is what RoryOF managed to fix... But the error is still present in the omega t file, and is being rewritten each time I generate the file again...

[dod]

can someone please take a look at this and see if they can recover anything I have tried so many things that I have found on this site with no luck.
thanks for any and all help.

[robleyd]

Is that file the one which you have already tried to repair? If so, do you have the original before your repair attempts?

The file supplied is not anything like a Writer file.

[dod]

This file is the one that I recovered with easeus, unfortunately I do not have another.
With recovering the text plan I would be more than happy.
thank you very much

[John_Ha]

Edit: Tutorial added

See [Tutorial] How to fix SAXParse errors in LibreOffice .docx files or [Tutorial] Format error discovered in sub-document for full instructions to recover the text.

[dod]

my document was done with OpenOffice, your link is for LibreOffice, am I wrong?

[robleyd]

The link is for documents saved as .docx from LibreOffice; your issue is a file with .odt extension which does not have the format of a .odt file.

[dod]

Attach another version of the file...

[John_Ha]

my document was done with OpenOffice, your link is for LibreOffice, am I wrong?

1. Extract content.xml from the .odt
2. Edit as described in the 3rd method where you delete all tags and are left with just the text.

It is identical for .odt written by AOO or LO and identical for .docx files - just extract \word\document.xml

[dod]

With zip extension it is not possible to open the archive, so I can not open the xml

Thank you very much

[RoryOF]

When the .zip file does not open, it can sometimes be possible to repair it (at least partially) with powerful archive diagnostics. I tried using two applications of increasing power and got no results. I fear your file is lost beyond recovery.

[volcano]

Hello!
Could you please help me recover this file? Thanks in advance.

[RoryOF]

Try the attached. Please ensure that formatting and content are as you require.

[robleyd]

And another version of a network diagram.

repaired.odg

(54.61 KiB) Downloaded 50 times

[volcano]

Try the attached. Please ensure that formatting and content are as you require.

Thank you very much! Everything works fine.

[Lapprentis]

I have tried to fix a ODT file myself but without success: I have limited computering skills,,,,Can someone help me ? Thanks. File is too big to put here: If someone can contact me to my email, I would send it back ! Thanks. Just add the @
lapprentis777 gmail.com

[robleyd]

Alternatively you could upload the file to a file sharing service such as Mediafire and post the link here.

[agusia]

Hello everyone,

Here is the file that I finished translating with the free software i am using (OmegaT). earlier this month RoryOF was able to repair an earlier version of the file, but unfortunately each time I generated it again from the software the error came back. So here is the final version, I tried to fix it myself once again but failed... (This is not the version I tried to fix). Here is the error message: Format error discovered in the file in sub-document content.xml at 2,66113(row,col). Thank you very much for your help!

Edit: File deleted as requested by the OP - FJCC

[robleyd]

Try this - I got 32 pages after repair.

Edit: File deleted as requested by the OP - FJCC

[agusia]

Thank you so much, this is perfect! I hope in the future I won't have the same problem with this software. Could it be possible to delete the file (including in its earlier version posted on January 8), since this is unpublished translation of a text I don't personally own the rights for? Thank you again everyone for your precious help.

[Pangloss]

Had a hard drive failure, went to go find an old backup copy of the file to find they were corrupted! I've got these two copies of the file with slightly different file sizes. Changing it to a .zip isn't recognized as an archive. If there is anything you can do that would be amazing.

Thank you for anything you can do!

[John_Ha]

Welcome to the forum.

I am sorry to have to tell you that both the files you uploaded are complete gibberish from start to end and there is no recoverable data in either. I examined them with a Hex editor (HxD) and they just have random junk in them. As you found, ODT files are ZIP files and your files are not ZIP files.

There is no hope of getting anything from them.

You say you had a disk crash. If just Windows got corrupted, and the data may still be OK, install the drive in another PC (or connect to a USB port with an adapter) and see [Tutorial] How to find and un-delete Writer temporary files for
a) detailed instructions on how to recover your file as it was when you last opened or saved it, or as it was when it was last saved with AutoRecovery.
b) how to find previous versions of the file in the folder it is located in, but which have since been deleted.
c) how to un-delete the temporary files Writer wrote while you were editing the file, and then deleted.

Random binary junk - not a ZIP file which begins with PK

As a new poster you will find much useful information in the Writer FAQ, the Writer Tutorials, the up to date Writer guide and the Writer Manual. May I suggest you bookmark the pages.

When a pop-up window opens, click the Help button for extensive help on that function - it is often more comprehensive than the manual.

[FJCC]

Hi there...I've been having issues with Windows 10 shutting down randomly which keeps messing with OpenOffice. Was in the midst of trying to get that fixed when it corrupted the most important file I have on my computer. I was hoping someone could help me and see if there is anything recoverable. There are 60,000 words on the line so I'm hoping to recover as much as possible; my last recoverable back-up was 30K words ago. I've been working on this for ten hours and can't seem to make progress, but I don't know that I'm even doing it right. The original file was giving me nothing but pound signs and during my attempts to fix it today I've been getting nothing but gibberish. I have bought and used the EaseUS Data Recovery program and have been trying to follow directions to convert zip files but keep getting a "Unable to find the local header for content.xml" message.

The .odt file is too big (152 KB) to post here so I am attaching a .zip file of the original and a .zip file of one of the older "recovered" files from EaseUS. Please let me know if there's anything more I need to do or if anyone can help me recover anything. Thank you so, so much for anything you can do and/or recover. I'm at my wit's end trying to figure this out.

[RoryOF]

I got nothing usable from either.

[John_Ha]

Both files are completely corrupted and there is no user data in either file.

Neither of the files is a proper .odt file: one is full of NULL characters (which is why the zip file is tiny) and the other has random junk in it with a tiny extract of some AOO metadata.

Your only hope is to see [Tutorial] How to find and un-delete Writer temporary files for
a) detailed instructions on how to recover your file as it was when you last opened or saved it, or as it was when it was last saved with AutoRecovery.
b) how to find previous versions of the file in the folder it is located in, but which have since been deleted.
c) how to un-delete the temporary files Writer wrote while you were editing the file, and then deleted. This will recover your file as it was when you last opened or you last saved it and is probably your best hope.

[LovingLife139]

Thank you both so much for trying. If it helps anyone else in the future, learn from my mistakes: Windows 10 has been shutting down randomly despite all tried fixes other than reinstalling the OS. It was messing with OpenOffice for obvious reasons and it got to the point where I couldn't edit my WIP because it would lock it as read-only. I scoured the internet for fixes and someone suggested turning off the OpenOffice AutoRecovery and back-ups. I did. It solved my problem and I could then edit and save my document. I was backing it up in other ways (clearly not often enough) when this happened. Because of the "fix" for the other issue, I now have lost half of my work and am devastated. I'm not sure what the answer is to the first issue I had, but don't fix it like I did since it can lead to not having those extra "just in case" files.

Thank you again. I went through your posted link, John, and all of those steps are what I tried to do yesterday, unfortunately. Can I request that someone delete the two files I left in my last post? Not that it matters content-wise since the file is gibberish, but the work is my own copyright.

[RoryOF]

On any work of major importance, be it a thesis, or The Great American Novel, we strongly recommend making regular (daily?, hourly?) timed/dated backups. Alternately, you can install the extension to automatically make such backup. This is at
http://www.flowcont.hu/LO_oxt_store/oxt/timeStampBackup_v1-1-6.oxt

On my works in progress I make daily dated backups manually - doing so means I know they have been done and I am not subject to failure of any automation.

[Zizi64]

timeStampBackup on the GitHub (mainteined by my son, Levente Kovács) :

The https://github.com/kovleventer/timeStampBackup