Document changes lost with no recovery?

[teawithcarina]

I’m sorry, you guys have probably received this kind of question a lot, but this is upsetting me a fair bit.

On Saturday, a wrote a whole bunch of new text into a document I use for drafts - several thousand words. Since then, the computer was closed/restarted a few times, but I thought I’d saved it. Even if it wasn’t saved, I have autorecovery to save every 15 minutes - I was working on the file for hours, so it should’ve saved.

But when I opened it today, everything I had written on Saturday was gone. And there was no autorecovery either.

Is there any way to get back what I did? Any place where autorecovery files are stored? Or would they be overwritten now, since I had the document open again? Is there any way at all to get back what I wrote? I spent hours on it and was really pleased with how it turned out, I’m really upset at the thought of having to rewrite all of it…

(Please don’t ask why I didn’t save. I genuinely have a memory of saving - because my computer had an update, so I saved everything I was doing so it could turn off. Even if that occurred beforehand or something, I have absolutely no idea why I wouldn’t have saved. It makes no sense to me. But I have ADHD and sometimes nonsensical stuff like that just happens. )

Edit: I’ve tried to restore previous versions but there are none. Also, it’s saying that it was last modified January 27, which makes no sense!!

[teawithcarina]

OKAY Ugh I’m so sorry you guys, I figured out what happened: I had another copy in Dropbox for some reason (??? I do not remember doing this) and it was that file which I made the alterations to. When I opened it up today, I opened up the version in My Documents. And this confusion is EXACTLY why I stopped putting things into Dropbox ever. Ugh.

Sorry, but thanks for everyone who answered trying to help!!!

[mikekaganski]

If you didn’t save, then this is expected. Autorecovery works like this: it saves temporary copy while you work; and this copy may help if program is terminated incorrectly (e.g., by a crash, or power outage, or the like). But when you close the program normally, the autorecovery is removed, both when you save (so the changes are stored in your file, so no use to keep it somewhere else), or when you discard changes (so you say that the changes aren’t required, and so are autorecovery data). And so the temporary storage is freed. Like it or not, that’s the logic of this feature.

[teawithcarina]

But, if I didn’t save, it must have shut off in some other way - the next day I had to restart my computer, so that must’ve been the time. I cannot believe that I shut off the program and did not save - weird stuff happens, but I cannot believe that I got the prompt to save and did not. So it must have failed the autorecovery, unless the save just didn’t work.

Are you absolutely certain that if the autorecovery didn’t come up, it’s just lost?

[mikekaganski]

No, if autorecovery itself (i.e. wizard saying there’s a file that requires recovery) didn’t start, it doesn’t mean there’s no autorecovery files in your Backups directory (see Tools-Options-LibreOffice-Paths).

And with regards of “I cannot believe that I got a prompt to save and did not” - well, having extensive experience in user support, I must say that everyone makes mistakes that they would consider impossible - but they do. Just everyone (including me).

[robleyd]

As soon as possible do the following:

Download Recuva (Win only) or PhotoRec (only one needed) and let it do an in-depth recovery of deleted files on your computer. You may get a file containing some or all of your data (or not). Do this as a first priority; other use of the computer may overwrite any existing but deleted files and prevent their recovery. There is no guarantee that you will recover anything useful.

Edit: Photorec is available for many OSes. From their website:

PhotoRec runs under

DOS/Windows 9x
Windows NT 4/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008/7/10
Linux
FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD
Sun Solaris
Mac OS X

and can be compiled on almost every
Unix system.

[teawithcarina]

Thanks, I’ll try this.

[bubba69]

what do you use for recovery on macair? Lost over 4 moths of data. all info was saved and available when I shut down my computer, but starting up the next day, the data had been lost.

[robleyd]

Use Photorec as mentioned above. It has a version for Mac.

Do this as a first priority; other use of the computer may overwrite any existing but deleted files and prevent their recovery. There is no guarantee that you will recover anything useful.