When I opened LibreOffice today, I was informed that I now had a new version of the program. Recent Files was empty. I opened a file I had been working on - and 99% of the file was missing.
Several hours of work are gone.
Is there any way to recover the missing data?
The LO never update itself automatically (edited: on Windows), only shows the information about an existing newer version. You must download and install the new version manually.
The appeared notification can not erase anything.
Then you have NOT saved it after the typing (before you close the LO), or - accidentally (and fortunately) - you saved it in an another place (by Save as). If you not saved the newly typed text - there is not to do: type-in it again.
Only, if YOU saved the file some time and took some precautions. There are options to save a copy of the previous version on save and you could use a backup-scheme (wich I doubt).
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A personal computer gives you (some) control of your system, but you are also the administrator. If your strategy is “I never had a car accident before, so why bother with safety belts” you may someday get hurt.
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I suspect you are on Windows (even when I usually assume the people who don’t tell use MacOS), but as you didn’t give any details you are on your own to check for possible places of backups or tools to use. Generally: Recovery tools work best directly after a problem. Using a regular OS often overwrites pieces of deleted files…
We need to account for the growing number of automatically updating LibreOffice instances:
- Most Linux distro-provided LibreOffice instances are updated by the system updaters, which could run automatically (if configured);
- Most stores update the software automatically (unless specifically configured to not do that);
- There are also alternatives like Chocolatey, allowing auto-updating.
I am on Windows, yes.
Windows does updates all the time, without being asked.
The file did automatic save fairly frequently. There had been another automatic save just as I finished for the night.
This has nothing to do with LibreOffice updates. If you installed LibreOffice from an MSI downloaded from its home page, and if you have no third-party software that monitors other apps and updates them (some antivirus software likes such crap), your LibreOffice will not update itself - it simply has no code to do that.
Are you relying on “automatic saves”??? Then you made a huge user error. LibreOffice only saves autorecovery information (for recovery after crashes) periodically, and it deletes that autorecovery when you close the application normally (no matter if you decided to save on prompt or not).