Hi, i need help. My friend saved the .odt document as .rtf. But she overwrite the original .odt file. When she tried to open it, all pages were blank. Now its a document with 57 blank pages, 1 milion blank symbols and 1,9mb. And every attempt to get back the content has failed. Document was very important for her, is there any chance to get back the text? Thanks for any help.
Don’t work with any other Writer documents before you did not do the following.
You cannot overwrite an odt-file with an rtf-file because the extension is different.
Are you sure that the odt-file is not existing anymore???
Open Writer > recent files and look if the filename with the odt-extension is to be seen there.
Try to search for the file if you don’t know the location anymore - search method depends on your OS.
If the odt-file is really not be found anymore, I would look into the back-up folder of LibO.
There is a small chance if LibO still keeps a backup copy.
Tools > Options > LibreOffice > path
There you see where on your PC the backup files are stored. If you are lucky you will find a copy there.
A general recommendation: Whenever you open a document, save it with the actual date before start working. I do in the format filename_yymmdd.ext. This ensures that you never loose more than a day’s work.
And another hint: Complete your work always in LibO’s native format and go to another forward only at the end. If you need to create files in a different format before you completed your work, save it always first in LibO’s native format. This format is very stable.
I also made a web search using “rtf file is empty”, Here a few links, more in the web. I did not make a test of what is proposed in the links. Thus I recommend to have first a look to see if there is a copy in the back-up files. Make sure you save this in a different folder before start working.
Links:
https://communities.sas.com/message/153509
Using OpenOffice.org To Repair A Corrupted RTF File (View topic) • Apache OpenOffice Community Forum <<< this appears to be an interesting one
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/265770-45-opens-blank-worrd-2007-2010
http://ask.metafilter.com/201306/Salvaging-a-corrupted-RTF-file-in-TextEdit
http://forums.textcontrol.com/showthread.php?319986-Empty-pages-in-rtf-document