I had several LibreOffice Writer files open on LinuxMint. I had not saved a number of them since the last changes I had made.
Suddenly, LibreOffice started telling me that it couldn’t autosave any of the documents, because my computer was out of space.
I checked it out, and it looked like my computer was indeed full, with over 900GB of strange junk files I don’t remember making. I don’t know why, and I’m not sure if it’s related to LibreOffice or not.
I sent the 900GB of weird files to the Trash (though I didn’t permanently delete them) and rebooted my computer. A bunch of error codes flashed briefly, but then it rebooted.
When I re-opened LibreOffice, it said that every file I’d had open when I crashed was successfully recovered, except for three of them. I thought, What the hell, it’s only a little progress lost on those three documents.
But they didn’t automatically open, and when I went to look for the shortcuts to those three files, I found that they were gone from the folder. I searched them by name, and found nothing. I looked in the Trash, and found nothing. They’re not in the recent documents tab.
It’s not just that LibreOffice failed to back them up, or recover them–it seems to have totally deleted the documents from my system.
They had been saved long before my weird storage-space issue began, so I don’t understand. Is there a way to restore these files, and is there a way to keep this from happening again?