Lost documents need recovery help

[Bigmanroy53]

10 days ago, several open office odt.documents on my desk (cloud) disappeared and i can't find them anymore. I'm with MacOs Big Sur 11.7.4.Need help Any suggestion ??

[RoryOF]

Earlier versions should still be in the cloud. It may be that at the time of disappearance your connection to the cloud dropped. You might try downloading an "undelete" utility and allowing it to search your computer for deleted (temporary working) versions.

[John_Ha]

Need help Any suggestion ??

Ask someone with better computer skills to help you. We cannot teach you remotely how to use a PC.

[MrProgrammer]

10 days ago, several open office odt.documents on my desk (cloud) disappeared and i can't find them anymore.

OpenOffice doesn't delete or move documents. Not being able to find documents on your Mac doesn't seem like an OpenOffice problem. If you click and hold the OpenOffice icon in the dock, you will see a list of the documents you recently worked with. You could try using Finder → File → Find → 🔍 Search if you know part of the name or can remember some of the content in the document. Learn more about this feature of MacOS with Finder → Help → MacOS Help → 🔍 Search → finding items. Also see Finder → Help → MacOS Help → 🔍 Search → spotlight. You should be making backups of important documents.

This forum is for OpenOffice. You may have better success on an Apple forum with learning how to search for or recover MacOS documents. A web search will help with locating one. If "(cloud)" means iCloud, also use MacOS Help for assistance with that feature. If "(cloud)" means something like Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, or others, check their support services.

Q23: How do I backup OpenOffice files on my Mac?
Q24: How do I restore OpenOffice files from backups?
Q63: Can I use OpenOffice with iCloud?

You might try downloading an "undelete" utility and allowing it to search your computer for deleted (temporary working) versions.

If your Mac has a solid state disk (SSD), "undelete" is likely to be a waste of time because the SSD sets all the bytes of the file to zeros as soon as it's deleted thus you can't recover the former data. This action allows the SSD to create new files more quickly. That's one of the reasons why you need backups of important documents.

[RoryOF]

It may be appropriate once again to remind Users that /File /Recent Documents in OpenOffice is merely a list of shortcuts to the files, kept for the convenience of Users. It is not a storage, either within OpenOffice or in the Cloud, of these documents, which remain in the folders on computer in which they were Saved.

If this list becomes damaged or lost, it will be rebuilt as each file (in its original location) is opened, often by using OpenOffice /File /Open and its navigation buttons.