Content of my document has disappeared

English
,
#1

I started using LIbreOffice about 2 weeks ago.

For the last 3 days I have been writing a document, saving it frequently. Today I wanted to continue working on the document. I opened LibreOffice and saw, under “Recent Document”, my saved document (first page, small size). I clicked on it to open it.
What happened next was shocking: the document DID open-yet it was TOTALLY EMPTY! All of its content-17 pages or so–disappeared! I checked the Recycle Bin, but since it was the content of the document that got deleted, NOT the document itself, it was not there. I performed various searches of my files, hoping that a backup copy of the document is somewhere else, but unfortunately, I can’t find it.

I’ve been using MS Office before since the very early 1990s and whereas on rare occasions I did lose files or they became corrupted, it was the first time in my life that suddenly the whole content of the document vanished!!!

I don’t think that anybody can help me to recover the document-yet I’d love to know HOW this problems occured? Subsequently I created some fake documents and tried to replicate this issue, yet could not.

I’d appreciate any comments.

Regards,

Jack

#2

My tips (for the future work):

  • Never work on a removable media directly.
  • Always use the native, international standard ODF file formats.
  • Always save more than one backup copy of your important documents with different (timestamped) names.

Can you upload the “empty” file here?

#3

Sorry to hear that, specially so early on. I can reassure you it hasn’t happened to me in the last 20 or more years except through hard drive failure. I did notice some weirdness in Windows this week when there was an unexpected update; restarting Windows solved that.

Where did you save your document to? USB drive? Cloud? Local drive?

Possibly something like a slip of the fingers such as Ctrl+A then S (select everything and replace with S) instead of Ctrl+S. There is an extension to help with this sort of issue, Timestamp Backup » Extensions.

#4

Zizi64 and EarnestAI: Thanks for your very prompt replies! I never save directly to a removable media, I used the native ODF file format and it’s extremely unlikely that I did Ctrl+A then S-because I only use the mouse to open the file, I clicked on the image. As I said before, I’ve been using MS Word for over 30 years and have created thousands of documents (it’s part of my job) and NEVER had such a situation.

However, the GREAT news is that I did recover the document!!! The recovery, however, had nothing to do with LIbreOffice. Namely, some 2 months ago I installed a free version of pCloud and all my LibreOffice files were saved and stored there. So I was wondering if I could recover the file through pCloud. Lo and behold, I found the following description in the pCloud “manual”:

Revisions

This option allows you to preview your file edits and restore previous versions, if necessary. You can access Revisions from my.pCloud.com by selecting a file and opening the more options menu (the three horizontal dots). File versions are kept for 15 days for Free and 30 days for Premium/Premium Plus/Lifetime users.

Amazingly, I could see a lot of versions of my documents–one of them was the most recent, 100% correct and completed version of my document!!! So I am SO GLAD that I used pCloud-it saved my day (literally–probably I spent 24 hours writing the document!)

Nevertheless, I’d love to find out how this issued happened. It was quite scary… from now on I’ll also save my documents on my hard drive and back-up media.

Once again, I really appreciate your replies!

All the best,

Jack

P.S.
BTW, I like LIbreOffice very much as it’s quite similar to MS Word and save for the aforementioned issue, so far I haven’t encountered any major problems and hope to continue using it.

#5

Does Pcloud offer an offline option? See this recent question with similar issue On new M2 MacBook Pro, existing files open as if new (blank)

#6

I looked up this question online:

  1. Can I use my files offline?

Yes, you can use your files offline, when you have no internet connection available. In order to make files available offline, follow these steps:

pCloud for Android/iOS

  1. Android: Open the app, locate the file and tap the more options menu (three vertical dots) and tap “Make available offline”
  2. iOS: Open the app, long-press a file and tap ‘Make available offline’.

pCloud Drive:

  1. Open your pCloud Drive file directory
  2. Select the folder you want to access offline and right-click
  3. Click “Offline Access (sync)”
  4. Choose a local folder and click “Add sync”

Before posting my question here, I did some online research and I also read that recent question. However, in my case there was no transfer of documents, I installed pCloud recently and it only has several files there.

#7

Likely that pCloud creates some alias files or links that resolve to empty when pCloud is not connected.

#8

Unfortunately, I don’t know about that, but I’ll keep an eye on my files in the future.

#9

Not related to your present problem but an important advice: there are huge differences in formatting between Word and Writer. Writer is based on styles though you can direct-format just like under Word. Word knows of paragraph styles only. Writer has more categories: character, page, frame and list styles. These categories are the key to its power. Forget what you know about Word workflow and learn how to use all style categories. Read the Writer Guide (and Bruce Byfield’s Designing with LibreOffice available from the same page) for an introduction. Also refrain from saving .doc(x) as the necessary conversions will progressively damage your document with their cumulative effects.

#10

Ajlittoz: Many thanks, I’ll certainly read the Writer Guide.

#11

Hi, New to LO Writer and liking what I see but a bit alarmed to read that I should “refrain from saving .doc(x) as the necessary conversions will progressively damage your document with their cumulative effects.” Is there more info on this in Libre help pages? As it’s likely many LO recruits are ‘defecting’ from Microsoft and will bring baggage in the form of .doc(x) documents, this seems like a problem.

#12

Most problems in using .doc(x) have two origins.
First, DOC(X) is a proprietary undisclosed format. Most of what is known about it comes from imperfect reverse engineering. And many aspects remain a mystery. To make things worse, M$ changes the format rather frequently, to the point we should write “formats” (plural) instead of “format” (singular).
Second, the basic principles are different between both suites (box model, hierarchy of “objects”, …). From a theoretical point of view, it is possible to convert from one design to the other for most “structures” if the definitions are fully understood. However, some of them need complex approximations and this is where corruption is likely to occur.

This description may look dramatic. In the simplest cases for “low-end” documents, everything goes fine. A document is considered “complex”, leading to degradation, when it contains tables and moderately sophisticated numbering (as well in chapter numbering as in list numbering). Inclusion of non-text objects like images, changes of geometry within pages, result in a “very complex” document.

A sound approach is to save native documents as soon as you need to modify them. Reading a document without modification is OK provided it is not too old. I made the mistake when I switched to LO Writer not to convert immediately my documents. I can’t do it reliably now on my oldest .doc (they are 30+ years old) because this version of their format is no longer understood nor supported, not speaking of the fact they aren’t encoded in Unicode.

#13

It is not OK :slight_smile:
I always advocate against immediate conversion of existing documents to ODF, just because the newer LO versions are expected to give better results when converting external formats. I myself made some improvements to import of old binary formats, including better handling of non-Unicode ones (e.g., I implemented use of LibreOffice configured locale to decide which encoding to assume, when the document doesn’t declare one - e.g., tdf#132796). So if there is a degradation in such a conversion in later LO versions, please do not hesitate to file bugs.

1 Like
#14

Thanks both of you. I guess time will tell.

#15

@mikekaganski
I made the story short. I didn’t convert in the beginning because old and new documents were on different computers. Also I needed time to master Writer. So both lines coexisted during several years.

When I decided I’d drop M$ entirely, I didn’t convert yet. Ten years ago, I needed to update these documents but it was too late. I had to export first as RTF, use a small bash script to translate encoding and last import into Writer. Unfortunately formatting was not preserved, with quite surprising effects. In the end, it was a chance. I rewrote the documents with much better formatting and, most important, dramatically improved contents.

#16

Thanks again for the heads-up - forewarned is forearmed. You’ve convinced me not to dispose of old laptops and I’m already thinking about efficient routines for converting old documents. (Top of the head speculation - perhaps there’s even a role for exporting/archiving old .doc(x) files as PDFs if MS>LO conversion loses formatting? That probably doesn’t sound efficient at all but RTF and scripts sounds a bit beyond my skill set.)
To be fair, we’re discussing rather exceptional circumstances: I’m guessing that only a minority of users will be opening documents 10+ years old. And I’m willing to believe the degradation issue is not so much an issue in the here-and-now. However, this won’t be an insignificant consideration for long-standing users of MS products contemplating jumping ship. Maybe the powers-that-be in LO should consider a guide or separate page on the topic?

Impressum (Legal Info) | Datenschutzerklärung (Privacy Policy)   Content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license.