Is LibreOffice safe to use for creating very important documents?

[Qing]

Hi all, I need some help. I’m considering switch to LibreOffice but I need some help.

Let’s say I’m creating a very private/important document on LibreOffice and I’m saving the document on a very secure USB (password protected + AES 256). During this ‘process’ there are some question I could ask myself:

• Should I install LibreOffice on my computer or ONLY on my USB?
• If I password protect my file, are there some unprotected temporary files LibreOffice create automatically?
• If yes, where can I find these temporary files so I can delete it (so that there is only ONE file)?
• If I save the file, besides the temporary files, are there other backups LibreOffice creates?
• If yes, who can read this & how can I prevent this?

I hope somebody please can help me with this.

[Lupp]

Well, I am afraid nobody can give you any guarantee that nobody else will be able to read your documents - or to monitor your typing them, if not you are very clever, not connected to any network, only working in windowless rooms, and decisive enough to enclose everything in a safe, and …
Read Snowden.
If your secrets not are absolutely cosmic, and you are on Windows, you can run a portable LibreOffice, and this way isolate it rather well from the OS. Also your user profile where recovery information and automatic backups (if enabled) would be stored, is on your portable storage device then. The rest is encryption. (And you cannot be sure that the algorithm hasn’t a backdoor - or quantum processors are more developed already than you were told.)
What malware (Coming with the OS? With the processor?) your computer had already caught in advance of your starting to be cautious - who knows?

[EarnestAl]

If you are very concerned with security then surely your hard drive is also encrypted. In that case you might not need to worry too much about any temporary files? Cheers, Al

[gabix]

Based on the questions, I would recommend the asker to try a live Linux distro on a USB stick/DVD. Or, maybe (even better for security), something like FreeSBIE.

Should I install LibreOffice on my computer or ONLY on my USB?

When you are running an operating system from a hard drive, the location of LibreOffice doesn’t matter much because swapping data and temporary files will be on the hard drive.

[anon87010807]

There is one thing that you have to keep in mind when you want to keep a personal document safe from other people. You need to remember the password. OpenOffice really scrambled your password protected documents and I suppose that LibreOffice still does. Meaning that if you lose your password, the file is lost.

It doesn’t matter where you install LibreOffice. For easy use it’s probably better to have it on your computer.

LibreOffice saves a backup of your file in a temporary folder and/or ausosave data if you tell it to do so - Tools - Options - Load/Save - General tab: “Save autorecovery information every … minutes” and “Always create backup copy”. I’m not aware of any other data being saved and I don’t know if those backup files are password protected, but you can figure that out for yourself.