Libre office 25.8 Win 10/64
I’ve located the backup files directory and see a large number of files that I have no more need of. Question, is there an option in Libre Office for managing these backup files, specifically to delete backup files with some user selectable parameters such as date?
Secondly, are the backup files .PDF’s by default? They can not be opened by a PDF reader, but can be opened and saved in LibreOffice DRAW.
Please advise.
The snippet below is from the Libreoffice document, The Getting Started Guide, page 484. If you follow the menu path in the snippet, it’ll take you to the Paths used by Libreoffice. I assume that is the directory that you have located. I looked in my Backups directory and there are a lot of files that end with .bak. It does say that there is only one backup per file — with a new backup file replacing the previous backup file and only if saved. The cleanup looks to be manual. Search this forum, this topic has come up before, here is one.
Just to mention it: This OS you have “Win 10/64” allow not only to display nice icons or previews of files. You can sort the view in explorer according to your needs. Either click on the column headers to sort by date/name etc. or use the context menu of the folder (find a spot where you can right click on the folders background or you will get the menu for a file).
If you need the illusion of being inside LibreOffice: Use the open-dialogue and perhaps resize it as big as you may need. Got to %APPDATA% or where your backup folder is. The dialogue allows you the same interaction as an explorer-window outside of LibreOffice (including delete)
But remember to leave the dialogue with “cancel” or LO will try to open the last file you clicked on.
IMHO LibreOffice checks the contents of the file it gets and will give it to the appropiate component (if it has one), but I did not test this.
Appending .bak is an easy system, but it gives an "unusable" extension, as the file may contain different formats. You'd need a "bak-open"-Tool, to pass the file or a temporary copy to the software responsible for the extension to the left of .bak.
I have partial solutions. The first pertains to the .PDF issue. The problem is that Windows file associations had set a .BAK file to open with Adobe Acrobat. This does not work. I looked through the advanced tab for other Open With programs and chose LibreOffice Calc. I also checked the box to do this all the time. The icon immediately changed from Adobe to Libre and further, the BAK file loaded into LibreOffice with a click or two.
Secondly, the location of the backup files in Windows is in a hidden directory. To get there use WIN +R, then type %appdata% from there find LibreOffice/4/user/backup
You may be amazed at the number of files you have accumulated in this backup folder
And is configurable through Tools | Options | LibreOffice | Paths to any preferred location.