Had to do an emergency shutdown of my computer because it locked up, and I the computer would not respond to mouse or keys. Normally when I am using Libreoffice it periodically make a ghost copy so if there is an emergency shutdown it asks me if I want to recover. I also save my progress quite often to my computer. This time it loaded in a new version 24.8.4.2 when the computer restarted and it did not ask me to recover. When I looked at what came up it had lost every bit of work I have done over the last 5 to 7 days, and on top of which overwrote my latest saves of the program with an old one from last week.
This “old document version from few days ago” tale appears from time to time. And it keeps puzzling me. There is no way for LibreOffice to restore something from several saves before; it is physically impossible for LibreOffice (unless the user enabled versioning in the specific document, which I assume not applicable to all those cases). However, it could be possible for the underlying filesystem; or for the operating system. I dislike conspiracy theories, but in this case, I can’t help but suspect the external player. If that’s a filesystem failure, then it could be not an explicit “evil plot”, just some unreliability (of NTFS?) - but then it should happen from time to time with other programs, too. But if that’s OS in play (and all the similar cases I recall were on Windows, something that you didn’t specify), then it could only be done on purpose by MS. Something that I definitely would like to be false.
Yes it is Windows 10
Checking my back up drive to see if that got corrupted also
Didn’t the computer try to “restore the last known good configuration” or the like, when rebooting after that lock up? It is something I remember from long ago, but in times circa Windows XP, that process could do many funny things, including restoring user files from some restoration point…
In the event of Windows crash and restore, you could certainly end up with an older version of the file if it were saved to the desktop rather than the Documents folder.
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You could also check the backup folder location for a copy and maybe in the temporary files folder for a file of the same time as the crash. Both folder locations are shown in Tools - Options - LibreOffice - Paths
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It usually does, but this time it didn’t
Yeah well i have already had to redo all the work I did before so the point is moot, but this time I saved it to documents, the desktop, and my external hard drive. At least one of them should be able to recover my work if that happens again.
The crash and restore I mean it usually does. First time it hasn’t. It certainly did not do it this time 
If you are going to save anything to the desktop, you should take some precautions, see The pros and cons (mostly cons) of saving files to the desktop | PCWorld
Better to have a shortcut on the desktop to a proper folder