I have the recover feature enabled, but I do not know how to disable it. It autosaves often, and I save often. But Libreoffice tends to crash, and when it does there’s a recovery option. Sometimes this saves me, but more often then not the recovery data seems to go farther back then the original document I have saved. Typically what happens it that it crashes in the middle of writing and closes out. I’m not sure how far back my autosave went, nor my manual save. I open recovery, and it goes several saves back. Now I’m stuck, especially if it autosaves while I’m looking at it. Because the “recovery” from several saves back has overwritten all the data from the previous document. Despite “Always save a backup” I never see any files in the backup folder. I would like it if there’s a way to open the recovery document as a separate file, a separate copy, so that way I can then open up the original and compare the two- which one has the most recent save? So instead of pressing “Start” it would be more like “Start copy”. Is there any way to do this?
Recovery data recovers too far behind
This makes only sense, if you perform several save operations within the time frame given by Tools -> Options -> Load/Save -> General > Options: [x] Save AutoRecovery information every x minutes. Hence you may want to change the setting to a lower number of minutes (e.g. from 10 to 2 or 3 minutes).
If you save your file manually every 5 or 10 minutes, turning on the recovery feature doesn’t make much sense. Instead, regularly save your document with a new name, so that you get a file history. Some people just add the date to the filename. The recovery feature also slows you down a little because every time it saves recovery data, it freezes the interface.
There is a “save with time-stamp backup” extension which might be of use. (Have to admit that I have it installed but have never used it.)
Added : Sorry, it does not seem to work in LO v6.4.7.2 running under Ubuntu 20.04. At least I can’t find where the time-stamped backups are being saved (not where the original documents are saved). If it worked, it would be a very useful tool.
@ve3oat: The extension saves the files in the backup folder of the user profile. To be more precise: it saves them in the folder specified in Tools - Options - … Paths, Backup path.
@anon87010807 : Thank you! And of course they were all where you said. I have written down your answer for the next time that I get “lost”.
So, the time-stamp backup extension does work in LO v6.4.7.2.