Installed Libre Office as supplied by Red Hat Enterprise Linux
LibreOffice version 7.1.8.1
OS: RHEL 9.5 64bit 16 CPU threads Calc:threaded Kernel 5.14.
Not that any of the above should matter, because it seems like a design flaw to me.
Reason: I have been working on a spreadsheet in LO Calc for two weeks.
LO settings default. Auto save every 10 minutes.
Unfortunately “backups were not turned on” neither within LO, nor on that filesystem.
Now, aside from that I have been saving file multiple times over these two weeks.
Now, I had to reboot the system after major update. If I recall correctly, I was asked if I wanted to save the file,- yes, of course.
Now after reboot I clicked on the file to open it in LO calc. I was presented with a dialog about files not being recovered yet. I clicked on start recovery, → recovered successfully. But it opened a file 2 weeks old.
I have spend hours trying to find a solution, but essentially it comes down that “you should have enbled a backup in LO” or look in temp directory.
Neither of this helps me, nor, more importantly, actually address the issue I want to raise here.
Could somebody explain to me, hopefully a developer, why LO tries to recover a document, that was saved, and even if it wasn’t why it recovers a document 2 weeks old, where, as I mentioned before the file had been saved multiple times manually over this two weeks, so it should not be 2 weeks old. I assume it recovered from somewhere in my ~/.config/libreoffice/4/, but I do not see anything. Trying to track changes - it tracks changes to the recovered file.
So, as of now, 2 weeks worth of work - lost.
It sounds as if the document was not saved with a valid filename, the system couldn’t write to the location, or the save location was some temporary directory that gets overwritten, maybe opened from an email?
Once a system update has started, it is unlikely that LibreOffice will have time or ability to save correctly and close down gracefully.
Look in Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Paths to find the location of Temporary files.
Look in there for a folder named lu[xxxxxxxxx].tmp where x the x are numbers and letters. The more recent folders might be the place to start looking. You want to find the largest file with a similar name inside the folder. Copy it to a working folder , open LibreOffice and from it, open the copied file.