While away from the computer it shut down along with libreoffice-writer and when I recovered the docs some had saved in new/altered form and others had not, losing new text. Can the lost text be recovered?
late but still …
Thanks, but that’s really just another question, isn’t it? There still hasn’t been an answer and I don’t think there is one. LO updated versions and that’s the problem. All docs “lost” from previous versions have been lost forever. They’ve not provided any route for recovery. At least not yet.
A crash will have effect only on open documents. You’ll lose all edits between the last save point (how the document looked in the file system when you last saved it, ot opened it by default). In some cases, the recovery feature can give you some bits but this does not replace save discipline.
If you’re talking about saved documents which were not worked upon by the failing session, you should find them where you stored them. Only a disaster with your disks (like mechanical failure, head scratching, …) could cause a complete loss. You may alos suffer from file system corruption because power failure prevented the OS to write back modified “pointers”, but with current journaled filesystems, this become quite rare. Of course, last editing sessions are lost but previous versions are still available. In principle.
Perhaps, you rely too much on LO Start Center which shows you a list of the most recently used files. This is simply a displat cache, not real storage. Your files are where you put them on save. Just look for them there. The Start Center cache can be reset under various circumstances, not speaking about its limited capacity (20 entries by default). Oldest entries are replaced by new ones.
Since you didn’t mention your OS name, nor LO version (nor also the format of your documents, but this is not primarily relevant here), we can’t give you a short list of default locations to look at.