Recover Calc data after manual save?

[gjoy8808]

I’ve been working in a Calc spreadsheet, and I lost an entire sheet of critical data. I made changes last night, including making a copy of a sheet (to use its formatting), and then saved and closed Calc.

Tonight I opened the file, and the recovery dialog popped up, which I followed to ‘recover’ this file, perhaps I should not have done this (I assumed I had just forgot to save it). I proceeded to make more changes/deletions, and saved (have not closed Calc yet) before noticing the missing sheet. I apparently must have chosen Move sheet instead of duplicating?? and therefore had been deleting and overwriting the original sheet, not the ‘copy’ I thought I was working in. Really unbelievable mistake on my part.

I immediately copied the hidden temporary file within the document’s folder, but I don’t know what else to do. I’m afraid to close the application or try anything in case there is still a chance of recovering the changes, although it seems unlikely. I did not specifically enable any versioning or change tracking in Calc before - I have basically all default options. Is there any hope of recovering any of the data or ‘versions’?

Any help would be hugely appreciated! I’m desperate… I have never made such a grave error before and the data is really important. Thanks in advance.

CALC:
Version: 6.0.2.1 (x64)
Build ID: f7f06a8f319e4b62f9bc5095aa112a65d2f3ac89
CPU threads: 4; OS: Windows 10.0; UI render: default;
Locale: en-US (en_US); Calc: CL

Windows 10 Home
Ver 22H2
Build 19045.3448
Windows Feature Experience Pack 1000.19044.1000.0

[Hrbrgr]

A help for the future:

Preventing data disaster

[gjoy8808]

Thank you, this is very helpful and thorough. I’ve done what I can from the list so far.

I did find 2 copies of the file in /LibreOffice/4/backups - one truncated and one that looks like a regular file with date stamp yesterday. I’ll try to open them on another pc tomorrow.

I did notice that the folder containing the document has “Ready for archiving” option set in the Windows properties. I’m wondering if there is a chance this archive has a copy, but so far I’m not sure if that means anything.

[Hrbrgr]

In Windows (usually drive C:) is the TEMP directory. It is only a vague hope.

[gjoy8808]

Thank you so much, I am very grateful for the response. Still working, but I have some hope with what I found in various folders so far. Got a bit from Win clipboard history alone (wasn’t aware of this!) - Windows key+V. I would have given up without a little direction… thanks again.

This was also very helpful if anyone else comes upon this later (applies to Libre + Open Office):

https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?t=85038&sid=488e97f5246c02c78cc370791190a667