Damaged File

[moony]

I had an odt file open (had saved since the last edit) when I lost power. This is Open Office 3.0, on Ubuntu 9.x Open Office attempts to recover the file, but is unable to do so. Opening the file directly results in 3 pages of hash marks (#) I get an error when attempting to open the file as a zip archive, as well as restarting open office and the computer, attempting to recover the file again. I saved a copy of the damaged file to a USB drive and tried opening it under windows, and tried several document recovery tools I found via google (all windows-only), to no avail.

The only thing I can guess is that power was lost during an auto-save, and I sincerely hope there is some way to recover the lost data. I do have a backup of the file, but it is a few days old, and missing about 6 pages of edits and new data. Honestly, I would like to restore the file to what the OS says is the last modified time/date (yesterday evening; the power (and data) was lost early this morning)

I tried to upload the file (58k) here, but I get an error of "Sorry, the board attachment quota has been reached." The damaged file can be found at http://www.mediafire.com/?z1mkm4jimmy

[r4zoli]

Check your backup folder if it contain any file:

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/home/<user>/.openoffice.org/3/user/backup

It will contain .bak files if you allowed creating backups, or filename_0.odt temporary file before recovery.

[moony]

that was the first thing I checked, no backups or temporary files, sadly. I had reinstalled the OS and OOo a few weeks ago and regrettably forgot to set automated backups.

[Hagar Delest]

Can't open your file, sorry. Seems to be that one: 22 page term paper replaced with pound signs.

Weird new bug, often involving a power shutdown. Haven't you saved manually? Have you tried to open the file from its standard location?

[moony]

I saved manually every couple of hours, including after the last edit, which the OS records as the last modification, around 9pm. The file was left open, and something must have happened with the autosave and the power loss. I do have a backup, like I said, but it is about 6 pages of loss. (much better than the whole 30+ page file, but still annoying)

That does appear to be the same problem I'm having... too bad it can't be fixed At least it's only about a day's work.

Here's hoping this gets resolved, and those who lost more data than I can get it recovered.

[Hagar Delest]

I saved manually every couple of hours, including after the last edit, which the OS records as the last modification, around 9pm. [...] I do have a backup, like I said, but it is about 6 pages of loss. (much better than the whole 30+ page file, but still annoying)

I'm not sure I've understood. How is your 9pm file? Still wrecked or is it the backup you're talking about? That 9pm file should be fine, else, it means that there is a deeper bug leading to data loss caused by a wrong recovery process. And that's quite critical because the last manually saved version should never been touched by the recovery process.

[shubhanyu]

That's right.... I have just faced the same thing in version 3.1.1 as well. I manually saved, and just as I began typing again, battery died... recovery fails and all I get is an error - Error Reading File.

This has got to be a more severe bug ... I am of the same opinion that the control-saved moment must not have been corrupted..

[acknak]

... the control-saved moment must not have been corrupted.

You can't always be sure of that. All modern OS's buffer the data written to a file, and even after the file is closed the hardware may buffer it. The time is short--it should all be safely on the disk in a few seconds, but laptops can take a while for the hard disk to spin up, and if the power fails at just the wrong time, you can lose data even in a manually saved file.