LibreOffice Writer won't save changes to a document

[AgentNoun]

A couple of days ago, my laptop ran out of battery power while closed, and LibreOffice Writer (with a copy of a document I was working on) was open when the laptop shut itself off. When I turned it back on, LibreOffice wanted to auto-recover the document, so I allowed it to do so. When it was done, I noticed that the last page or so of work that I had done was gone, even though I had saved it–several times–while writing.

Now, I’ve noticed that LibreOffice simply won’t save changes to this document. No matter what I type, if I save it, close the document, and reopen it, it reverts to how it was when it was auto-recovered.

I tried copying all of the information to a brand new document, and saving it there, and it saved. Then I tried to edit it, save it, and close again, and THAT wouldn’t save. For some reason, I can’t add to or change this text, no matter what file it’s in, even if I make a brand new file for it. How can this be? Is there any way to fix this, or will I need to retype the entire thing from scratch?

[dajare]

[It is really helpful to know (a) which LibO version; (b) which OS/platform and version you’re working with! Could you update your question with this information?]

There is one bug report (fdo#63234) that seems to bear some similarities to your report, so that might be worth checking.

Is your document heavily formatted? If not (and perhaps, even if so!), have you tried saving/exporting to a plain-text (no formatting) filetype? Another option to achieve the same goal would be to CTRL-A > CTRL-C to copy all the text to the clipboard, then paste it into your favourite plain-text editor (Notepad++, or Gedit, or TextWrangler, or the like - just not a “rich-text” editor). Then copy/paste THAT text back into LibO.

Ideally, of course, it would be most helpful to know what glitch is causing this text to be ineditable. It would also be good to know whether this text-only work-around works!