Writer Has Been Saving My Documents Empt/Blank?

[yonatron_io]

Hello, I have been using open office for over a year and have so far not run into this problem, until now.

My computer crashed, and I went back to open the documents I had saved, and it turns out that apparently all but a few of the documents I've been writing over the past week have been saved as blank, meaning they are empty, 0kb.

I am running OO 4.1.1 on a Windows 8 computer. I don't know if the crash is what erased them, because so far I haven't had cause to go back and open any of them until now.

A few of them did save properly, in spite of the fact that I've done the exact same thing with all of them.

I went and looked at Tools>options>paths and none of the temporary files had any contents, either.

I'm on the verge of using something else besides open office, because this is for my job and I can't be unsure about whether they will save properly, or not.

Is there any better way to recover these documents, or at least what was written in them before they improperly saved or were erased by the crash, whichever it was?

Thanks

[RoryOF]

What are the save dates on the files? I suggest you delete or rename your OpenOffice user profile.

Close OpenOffice and the Quickstarter. Open File Explorer. Copy and paste %appdata%\OpenOffice\4 in the File Explorer Address Bar and press Enter. Rename the "user" folder. Start OpenOffice.

[yonatron_io]

Will that recover or only stop the problem from happening in the future? If the latter, should I explore any possibilities of recovery before I do this?

[RoryOF]

It will not damage the existing files. It is possible that the data is in the files but because of corruption in the User Profile it is not being read. Do not attempt to save over an existing file to avoid any damage. If you can read a file after the renaming of the user profile all should be well.

What are the dates on the files? Do these dates correspond to the original Save times/dates. or are they the date/time of the crash?
Also, what format are the files?

[yonatron_io]

The files are .odt, and save times appear to still correspond to original save times, and not the crash.
It seems mysterious to me that the files that have been blankified are intermixed with those which still show text. I wonder what the pattern is.
Alright, I will follow the steps you outlined, then.
...
I did so, and it's presenting me with the registration wizard. Shall I continue and register?

[yonatron_io]

I went ahead and did it, nothing has changed.

Also, another thing I didn't mention is that it is giving me a prompt to select ASCII code options with the blank documents, but not with the ones that saved correctly.

[RoryOF]

The ASCII prompt means that OpenOffice does not understand the type of file; this usually means that the file has been corrupted, perhaps by corruption in the directory structure arising from the crash. Time to restore these files from your backups; some versions of Windows perform an automatic backup, is this "Restore Point"; I am not familiar enough with modern Windows versions to advise on that with any certainty.

[yonatron_io]

Oh, you mean restore the computer to a previous point in time? Maybe, there would have to be a restore point between the time that I wrote them, and the time that it crashed. I will look into that tomorrow, thanks!

[floris v]

IIRC restore points are used to return Windows to a stable configuration. As far as I know it doesn't affect your files. Windows will "forget" programs installed after that restore point was set. What you should do is run a utility to scan the hard-drive for errors, if that hasn't been done already. Like https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2641432 if you are on Windows 7.

[Bill]

System Restore doesn't backup user files in Windows 8. File History in Windows 8 can be configured by the user to backup user files.

[yonatron_io]

My God, now two of the three files I lost are completely absent. I don't know how that happened, but this whole thing is frustrating. I think with the amount of time I'm devoting to fixing it, I could just re-write the articles. Sucks that it's 3 hrs of my life down the drain, though, and I also want to make sure that it doesn't happen again.

[Bill]

Have you checked for a virus or a failing hard drive?