hi, I’m having a terrible time with .odg files disappearing on my M3 Macbook air, os 14.3, LO 25.2.2.2
files I know i’ve saved simply do not seem to exist on my computer. I have not deleted them accidentally, I have looked in the Library files for LO backups and there’s nothing related to the ones I’m looking for.
i have found a file that was missing once before, but I cannot recall how and don’t think I understood even at the time how it reappeared.
ods files are not missing as far as i can tell, but I don’t use them anywhere near as much
searching by name doesn’t find them, searching for .odg also doesn’t find them, though there are lots of other ,odg files
it has happened before that I’ve received the mysterious “this file is in use by another instance. open anyway?” message after LO crashed, which it has frequently. I lost a lot of work, but an update to LO fixed the autosave function and I stopped losing the progress. this is different, though - the files are nowhere to be found.
I can go to a private data recovery firm and see what they find, but I’m so puzzled, and actually kind of despondent. It’s happened a lot. Apple has no explanation, but I’m going to the Apple store to see what they can do, which is likely nothing but offer to wipe the disk with an os upgrade…
AMAZINGLY, I’ve found the files by asking Claude how to do it. I used a Terminal window and the command line:
find / -name “*.odg” -type f 2>/dev/null | grep -i “keyword”
They were there, but the finder didn’t see them until forced to by the specific directory path. Thank Claude I thought of asking Claude.
Consider saving files within the folder that Mac expects, the Documents folder.
That’s already the case. The real problem is different. The real problem is that the file metadata was corrupted by the incessant crashes of LibreOffice (now on 25.2.5.2, still crashes). I used Claude further to find all the corrupted file pathways on my computer by Terminal prompts, and there were 160! All of them LO files, mostly Draw. Then I continued by repairing them all.
Can’t you just open the Documents folder in a file manager and see the files? Or are the crashes and invisible files indicative of an error within the OS or hardware?
No, the files were invisible to both Finder and Spotlight. The pathways were corrupted. I had to use Terminal to find the files by name, then various other prompts to repair the metadata. I don’t know what ‘file manager’ you’re referring to, either. The error logs indicate that there’s some fundamental incompatibility between the M3 architecture and the LO architecture. This is detailed in the bug report I made on Bugzilla.. I am not knowledgeable enough to interpret any of it, nor comment on the accuracy of that interpretation, but I am able to execute the commands and understand the explanations. Here is an excerpt from the AI conversation, relevant to the errors:
Prompt:
LibreOffice 25.2.5.2 is crashing randomly on my M3 MacBook Air (macOS 14.3) with instant disappearance (no beachball). I found significant system logs showing process management failures. The crashes corrupt file metadata and LibreOffice’s auto-recovery creates files with null metadata values. I’ve submitted a bug report but need help analyzing these system logs and finding workarounds. Key log entries show: * “Specified target process does not exist” errors * “Failed to acquire AppNap adapter assertion” errors * “Task policy set failed: 4 (invalid argument)” errors These suggest LibreOffice processes are terminating so abruptly that macOS RunningBoard service loses track of them. I need to analyze more detailed logs and explore alternatives since LO is unusable for technical drafting work.
Here are the results from what I just finished up with your previous “inclaudation”:
Reply:
Looking at your LibreOffice error logs, I can see a clear pattern of macOS system-level process management failures that are causing the sudden crashes. Let me analyze what’s happening and suggest some solutions.Analysis of the Error Patterns
The logs show three critical issues:
- RunningBoard Assertion Failures: The repeated “Specified target process does not exist” errors indicate that LibreOffice processes are terminating so abruptly that macOS’s RunningBoard service (which manages app lifecycle) loses track of them.
- AppNap Management Issues: The “Failed to acquire AppNap adapter assertion” errors suggest problems with macOS’s App Nap power management system trying to manage LibreOffice processes that have already disappeared.
- XCTest Framework Interference: The “test daemon not ready” messages suggest development/testing frameworks may be interfering with normal operation.<
So, there’s no “just”, and I wonder why you say “indicative of an error within the OS or hardware”. I don’t know if you mean that the errors are because of faulty engineering by Apple, or that where the errors take place is within the OS/hardware, but it seems there’s some kind of incompatibility, anyway, between LO and macOS on M3 Apple silicon with its integrated memory. Nor do I know if there’s actually any difference between those three. Nothing else I use crashes or behaves improperly on this laptop, though, admittedly, the only third-party software I use is LO and Firefox, which make up almost all of my usage. The LO crash immediately after taking all the steps to mitigate it - update to 25.2.5.2, file pathway and metadata repair, recreating the drawing in a new document - corrupted the metadata, new user profile - thus corrupting the pathway again. This never happened before on Intel chip Apple hardware, as far as I know, though there were occasional crashes, I never simply lost a file. I lost work, yes, because there was no auto-save feature, but the recovery process didn’t cause Finder to lose any knowledge of the files, causing me to have to spend days looking for a way to find what I knew had to be there. I have, at least learned quite a bit about what will soon be obsolete anyway.
In that case, you have done the important bit and filed a big report