I tried to cut and paste from a libreoffice document. I went the usual way. Cut it. then i closed the file i cut it from and saved it when it asked me to. After that i opened a new file and it just doesn’t paste. Not by right click, not by control ‘V’. I am a screenwriter and that was a full screenplay. Any way I could recover it?
Unfortunately no, I’m afraid.
In future, please try to avoid such destructive work patterns. Many factors may affect that; e.g., it may happen that pasted result would not satisfy you (formatting distorted due to different templates); power outage or OS failure that may happen before you save your second document; clipboard problems etc. Safety is crucial not only to computer professionals.
My tips for your future operations would be -
-
Always create a backup copy of important documents.
-
Use copy and paste rather than cut and paste so you have the original content if something goes wrong with the paste. When you have successfully pasted you can then cut from the original document.
I agree with previous answers that backups are important. However, based upon the number of others who have had similar experiences you should be aware there are methods to lessen the loss of information.
In particular, timestamped backups. With the installation of a few macros, setting a couple of parameters (save location, # of backups saved, time intervals) this can be automated. This does in no way override the normal precautions of backing up data, but includes an extra level of insurance.
For further information, see this post. The instructions and macros are in the answer by @mark_t (v1.3 of TimedAutoBackup.odt is latest).
If the text you lost was ever saved (eg as fred.odt) use Recuva or a similar un-delete utility to look for earlier, now deleted, versions of fred.odt.
If you were editing the file and the text had been saved, then see [[Tutorial] How to find and un-delete AOO/LO temporary files (View topic) • Apache OpenOffice Community Forum] [Tutorial] How to find and un-delete Writer temporary files for instructions on how to identify and un-delete the temporary files Writer wrote while you were editing the file and busy losing your text, and then deleted. The first deleted temporary file is a copy of the file being edited as it was when opened which hopefully contains the now lost text.
Neither will work if you are using a SSD.
Have to remember the file must have not been overwritten in the slightest to be recovered.
Ideally yes, but as long as content.xml can be recovered from the recovered file it does not matter if the recovered file is incomplete and other things have been lost.