I use Windows 10, latest update on an HP laptop, am using LibreOffice Writer only, version 6.3 I believe. My 12 page document suddenly changed (was in a larger font) , but I did not notice it was a very early version. When I went to close it, it wanted me to save so I did. When I went back into it, it was a very early version, so I have lost all the changes I have made in the last week. When I click File, Versions, no versions show up. I need my updated document back. How can I find it? What is weirder, is that my laptop’s mousepad had become very sensitive (if I touched the pad at all, it moved to a different place in my document. Suddenly a different version came up (I thought it was only the font size had changed). I don’t know what happened. But I need to find the most current document; otherwise, I have wasted 40 hours of work. Any suggestions?
LibreOffice internal
LibreOffice offers via the menu Tools>Options>Load/Save as ″ Save ″ the possibility to save the auto recovery information every “X minutes” (“X” stands for the number of minutes). LibreOffice uses the auto recovery info to recover a file after a crash.
A check mark can also be placed there ″ Always make a backup copy ″. This saves the previously saved version of the document in a copy with the extension .bak when you save a document. The next time you save it, it will be overwritten by the next status. This is a measure that is mainly used so that you can go back to an earlier version if you made mistakes when editing a document.
Backup copies are saved in the directory that is set under Tools>Options>LibreOffice>Paths for backup copies. On Windows 10, the backup copies are in the directory by default C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\LibreOffice\4\user\backup deposited.
File>Versions is a Writer internal version management system. It is user-controlled, that is, you explicitly tell Writer to checkpoint your work and record the intermediate state of your document so that you can later revert to it.
It does not replace a serious backup strategy based on files saved under different names. It has limitations (mainly when you revert to an earlier version: all later versions are then “lost”).
Consequently, if you did not activate the function, no versioning was done (how could Writer determine what a version is in your workflow).
If you saved without changing the filename, there is no easy way to recover an earlier state of the file.
However, if your disk is not too full, you can try installing a salvaging utility (search the internet) and scan your disk in the hope the utility will recover previous file not yet overwritten. Your hope is a function of the file system technology (journalled or not), the security features enabled on your computer (whether “deleted” files are overwritten or not) and the fragmentation of freed space (complicating the task of assembling file segments into a consistent file).
Consider that a careful salvage operation may take a good number of hours. So ponder the trade-off between spending your time on the operation (and learning how to do it safely) and typing again your changes, focusing on document content instead of wasting time on preventing things from going worse (recovery-wise).
If your mouse pad became highly reactive, something changed in the OS configuration for the hardware. Check that.
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Try some of the data recovery techniques in this post. Remember to regularly save using Save As using some sort of file revision system. This is exemplified in the post.
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