Recover lost file

[indiadreamer]

I was working on a long personal journal of over 20,000 words. I mistakenly touched something and suddenly all I had was a blank page. I thought I had the autosave feature ptoperly set up but for some reason it had switched to from every 4 minutes to every 15. I was hoping there would be something saved in the autosave but there was nothing. And to add to the mystery the copy which I have been making on my own for several months has changed to one I made last year. I have Windows 11. Is there anything I can do with this mess to get my current OpenIffice pages back? I sure hope so.

[robleyd]

If you still have the file open in Writer you could try Edit | Undo or Ctrl+Z to see if you can undo whatever the action was.

Failing that this tutorial has some suggestions for recovering temporary files which might help.

For future peace of mind, consider installing the Timestamped backup extension, which will allow you to make multiple, timestamped backups of your document.

[indiadreamer]

Thank you for your suggestions. Unfortunately, I think I am out of luck, mostly because I didn't have autosave set up properly. I won't make that mistake again. To add to the mystery, I think about half of the document is still there. I wish I knew what I mistakenly touched to cause this problem. Oh, well, what is done is done. Thank you.

[MrProgrammer]

I thought I had the autosave feature properly set up …

There is no AutoSave feature. There are only AutoRecovery and Save a backup copy. Read about those features in Help → OpenOffice help → Index → automatic saving.
• Autorecovery only helps when OpenOffice has crashed. That was not the case here.
• The backup copy only helps if you immediately copy it elsewhere before working with the document.
Where is my autosave backup

It is your responsibility to issue File → Save or perhaps File → Save As when you want to write your document to disk. I use File → Save to commit important changes to disk. Then I use my operating system (not OpenOffice) to create multiple copies like FileName_0514_0922 as I work so I have multiple recovery points (0514 is the date; 0922 is the time). Many operating systems can be configured to make periodic backups for you. Consult the documentation for your operating system for the procedure. These periodic backups are not part of OpenOffice so don't expect to find advice about them here.

I mistakenly touched something and suddenly all I had was a blank page.

Whenever something unexpected happens when using OpenOffice I immediately use Edit → Undo (⌘Z on MacOS Ctrl+Z on other operating systems). Using Undo is an automatic response; I don't have to think about it. Then I carefully try the operation again. If I still get an unexpected result I save the file to disk and make a copy if it before proceeding any further. All you had to do to recover your work was use Undo when the blank page suddenly appeared.

[RoryOF]

A recovery utility, such as Photorec or Recuva, might find a deleted work copy on your hard drive. If you are using an SSD drive there is little chance of recovery using one of these, but it is still worth trying.