I lost part of my work on writer after saving. how do I get it back?

on libre office writer I lost the last 500 words that I wrote today after saving and reopeing it.

I saved it as .xml as i have done since it started throwing up an error when saving it as .odt.

When I open my file it still says at the bottom the number of words I have written yet they arent there. Instead there a lots of " marks and blank lines.

I started using this a few weeks ago, saving no problem before it no longer liked me saving as an odt and now this so I am thinking I may have to use something other than libreoffice as its just not safe, so any help would be great thanks.

FYI, leymans terms please. Thanks!

An XML file is a plain ASCII file with tags, so you can open it with any text editor and see if your text is still there - it should be near the end of the file, you can skip the start. You can also check temporary folders in your user profile 9see below) but by now they have probably been cleared.

If saving in the (native) odt format gives you problems, you shouldn’t switch to another file format, you should figure out what’s wrong. What you describe is not normal behavior, and it’s something on your computer. First, give LO time to save your work. If you are on a laptop, don’t just close it down immediately after the save command. Give it some slack. Use the normal close down procedure. Second, if that doesn’t work, you can reset the user profile, that’s a folder where all of your customizations and preferences are stored. See https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/UserProfile for an explanation about it. Third, as a last resort, do a complete re-install.