I have an essay due tomorrow that I was planning on reading over one more time before handing it in. I noticed there was recovery data for the document, so I recovered it. Now all that is left is the blank template that was handed out for the essay. It was saved multiple times, including when it was done, but now opening it shows the same blank template. It also did this to the backup of the file I was manually saving, and my list of sources. Is there any way to undo this recovery?
There are as much less chances to recover your document as you didn’t mention OS name, LO version and save format. You didn’t describe the scenario which led to the crash. Worse you seemingly attempted to recover without knowing exactly what you were doing. If recovery was completed, whatever the result, recovery data was erased preventing you from attempting it again.
Your only hope resides in some “salvage utility” which could explore your file system to find previous versions of the document.
Tag is ubuntu, so I “guess” OS is Linux, but version and desktop unknown.
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In any case the description did not fit to any kind of recovery LibreOffice provides, especially, if other saved versions are told to be reset to blank files. This also don’t fit to any backup-“concept” I’ve ever seen.
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LibreOffice’s recovery is usually only shown after a crash, but can sometimes experienced by users who never close programs on laptops, but just “close the lid” when the battery looses power…
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A manual save should not be affected, if the file is closed. Only a crash during this manual save may corrupt both files. (So it is better to do this after closing lo in explorer/finder/nautilus/dolphin or wich filemanager one uses.)
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You may check, if any true backup-system is active on the OS.(On Mint one is asked to activate time-machine while installing the OS. I don’t know, if there is a similiar question on *buntu)
Just in case, did you check to see if the original document is still where you saved it?
So I ended up just re-doing the essay, but here’s some more details:
- I am using Kubuntu 22.10
- The laptop I am using is a Lenovo ThinkBook 14 G3
- The battery died while I was reading through it last time, I think the recovery was meant to recover a few minor edits I made to it right before the battery died
- The reason it died was because the charger got unplugged from the wall without me noticing
- When I said “blank” document, what I meant was everything that I did since I downloaded it was missing. The instructions at the top were still there, and were when it was first downloaded
- This was stupid, but I was copy and pasting edits over to the manual backup in a new window.
- The original document shows that it was edited recently, but it is the same as the downloaded template
- Some LibreOffice application files appear to be missing, specifically the temp folder and recovery folder. I am not sure if these are only there when there are meant to be files in them, or if they are created when either is needed however.
Save early, save often. By this I mean Save As to a known location and give it a name related to the document, after that press Ctrl+S every time you stop to think.
If the document is important or long consider doingFile - Save a Copy with the same name but date suffix YYYY-MM-DD. This gives you backups that you can revert to in a similar case or of you decide that you lost direction in your document and you want to restart from an earlier point.
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