I was tying when suddenly everything in the document disappeared
Perhaps you accidentally clicked Ctrl+A - Select All; try Ctrl+Z or Edit | Undo if you still have the document open.
More like CTRL-N for a new document. I’ll bet the newly created document is opened over the old one.
If Ctrl+Z or Undo (try several) doesn’t work but you had been saving regularly (why wouldn’t you?) and you don’t mind losing the last few minutes of work you could try closing without saving and re-opening (or File > Reload).
If you have saved over the top of your lost work there is a chance still, see this question How to recover former version of document . Note that you might need to be able to see hidden files, in Windows Explorer click on the View tab and tick the box that says Hidden Items.
@Musicmecca : Above are 4 good suggestions of ways to recover your manuscript. Please let us know if any of them solve your problem, or your detailed observations of what exactly happens when they don’t succeed. To help you further, we need more information from you.
I have just had the same problem but none of the above comments help. I doubt that I had accidently hit a ctrl+z but that doesn’t delete an entire open document, ot does it? bte it’s not in the recycle bin either.I opened a write document that I had not touched for some weeks, put several hours into editing it when suddenly the whole document disappeared, leaving me with a blank screen. The weeks old copy is still on disk, all the edits are gone. I thought there was an automatic back-up every so many minutes, there is on my calc documents. That’s not there either. I do have memories of the same thing happening some months ago. That was not a big deal as very little work was lost so I didn’t follow up.
Continuing from the above. I notive that under “Tools/options/load-save/general” the box beside “Save AutoRecovery every 10 minutes IS ticked.” So if that is working, where does it save?
The backups are saved in the location given in Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Paths. Note that if you have been opening and saving the file then the previous save is the one that is stored in backups, that is, a save since you lost some work might have overwritten the previous backup.
Don’t discount using the File > Save a copy menu entry, just give the copy a name with date, version, or time appended.