I have an original word document, my address list. I go to this first every time I want to access it or edit it. It opens in Libre Office and brings up the Libre Office Document Recovery screen/message. Should I select ‘Start Recovery’ or ‘Discard Recovery Data’, please?
Kind regards,
Ruth M.
The recovery screen normally comes up if the last instance of LibreOffice did not exit properly (e.g. because it crashed or the process was killed), and allows you to attempt recovery of unsaved changes to any documents which were open at that time. However, LibreOffice can’t always tell reliably whether there were actual changes to those documents.
If you are sure you have saved everything you wanted to save the last time you worked on this document, it is safe to discard recovery data. In that case, you will get the document as it was when you last saved it.
However, you might still want to look into why you are getting the recovery dialog. I’ve seen this happen on some setups if the system was shut down with LibreOffice still open—closing LibreOffice (and either saving or explicitly discarding changes) before shutting down prevented this from happening.