Writer file corrupted

[mudarad]

Hello! I have a Writer file that was saved since the beginning as a DOCX document. When I finished working on it, I saved and closed, and then sent it to a friend by WhatsApp, then noticed that it was corrupted! Help! It’s a work of a number of days!!

Details:

LibreOffice version: 6.1.6.3 (x64)
OS: Windows 10.0

The file was left open on my laptop for days, while I was working on it. It was being autosaved every 10 minutes. I also would save it every now and then. It was being saved on my local Google Drive folder, and automatically synced. When I tried to recover an older version of the file from Google Drive, all the older versions turned out to be corrupted as well.

The language I used to type the file was Arabic.

After finishing the job and sending the file, I updated Windows and restarted, then opened the file again, only to notice that it was corrupted. What showed was only question marks like this:

???
???
???
???

etc!

I tried downloading an older version from my Google Drive. Same problem. I tried opening the file from MS Word rather than Writer, I got an error message saying that the file could not be opened, while in Writer, the file opens but is corrupted.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

[mrodent]

Hi. Due to the defective nature of this website, and the lack of interest of those responsible for it in correcting things which are wrong, I have no idea when you posted this: for the date/time it merely says “0’17”, whatever that means.

Concerning your problem, I’m fearful that the entire contents may have been deleted. Usually I see “#####” replacing all the text. Most of the searches I have done seem to indicate that this means everything has been replaced by … NOTHING.

Unfortunately, LO Writer has some major reliability issues, which mean that I personally take some pretty complicated measures to back things up in multiple ways.

Unfortunately, using Autosave is not sufficient. Nor is using an online backup service, such as Google Backup and Sync. For the simple reason that all too often these services will back up your file AFTER it has been corrupted already.

You therefore have to set up a system of timed backups and/or occasionally (manually) have to save your precious files in another format (such as .docx or even .txt) … just in case LO Writer decides it’s going to destroy hundreds of pages which may have taken you thousands of hours to write.

These catastrophic content deletion events seem to be associated with system crashes. I also currently use a dual-boot arrangement (W10 and Linux), which may cause problems.

In Linux there is a pretty reliable and powerful “timed-backup” program called Backintime: this will keep a configured number of past backups, so if a catastrophe happens you can reach back in time (a few days, weeks or even months) and find a version of a file before it was destroyed. I don’t know whether such a timed-backup system also exists in Windows (or Mac).