Dear LibreOffice community,
Yesterday, I continued to edit a Word document on my laptop using LibreOffice Writer 5 until my laptop feels frozen with hesitance of the mouth arrow. Before thinking restarting the laptop, I knew I need to save my work and managed to click on the Save button among those across the top and the Save button did turn gray. By then I could not close out properly with the frozen arrow, so I turned off the laptop. I then switched my USB to my desktop to find that there is no ready-to-open saved document for this document in the USB20FD drive (F:), but an entry that shows like .~lock.filename.docx# in which the name of my document is prefixed with .~lock. and suffixed with #. I clicked on this entry and a window would appear to say “How do you want to open this document?” and “Look for an app in the Microsoft Store,” etc. I have already a number of like entries in the past which I am unable to open, but the current one is important and urgent. Can you help me solve this and get back to where I left off, instead of having to rework from a much earlier version of the same document? If not, four days of diligent work would be lost. Over these four days from 2/27/21to 03/03/21, I have properly saved it a number of times. It is really miserable to see that none of these prior saves appear to have remained. Please help me.
.~lock.filename.docx#
… this can be opened using any text editor like wordpad, notepad or some such. However, it is worthless for recovery purposes, since it contains only information about user, system name, date, time and profile location. In that sense it is not “…important”
>I then switched my USB to my desktop to find that there is no ready-to-open saved document for this document in the USB20FD drive (F:)
Just my 5ct advice: Never use an USB device as a primary storage device for important documents. Saving to USB storage device is asynchronous in the sense, that applications get informed a save has been completed, while in fact data are still being sent to the device (Make a test and watch activity led on a USB device while storing a very large file to the device[100+MB]). A general failure is: Removing the USB device or powering off the computer while this data transfer is still in progress.
Thank you for your comments and suggestions. But this was a document only 3-4 pages long yet included very condensed information. I did look into Tools > Options > Load/Save > General to find that my Save block shows as follows:
√Save AutoRecovery information every 15 minutes (checked);
Edit document properties before saving(unchecked);
Always create a backup copy (unchecked);
√Save URLs relative to file system (checked);
√Save URLs relative to internet (checked).
I did also look into Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Paths, and single-left-clicked on Backups as well as Temporary Files to see only blank. My questions are that if the save-every-15-minutes function is working, where can I locate the document I saved and last seen on 03/03/21? Also, I have been using this laptop for several years ever since I bought it and installed in it the LibreOffice Writer 5, and it must have saved a list of things rather than the blank I saw. The fact that I saw nothing suggests to me that I may have incorrectly accessed the Backups and the Temporary Files. Anyone can help me?
You have no backups; Always create a backup copy was unchecked.
There might have been an outside chance for LO to recover files if laptop was rebooted with USB still in it; I don’t know for sure. Probably too late now.
Some low level recovery program might find some of your work on the USB if it hasn’t been overwritten yet.