All of a sudden a couple of very important odt files which I have intermittently worked on for years are 0 kb. No crashes, auto save was on. They were ok earlier today and the PC has not been turned off.
The only disconnection I can think of is the one from my cloud storage where they are stored. But it never destroyed any files before.
I am on Linux Mint. LibreOffice’s Backup folder is empty.
Any chance I can recover them with some recovery software?
Probably not. Unless you have a real backup (as you mentioned “cloud”, doesn’t that (whatever cloud may mean except just someone else’s computer) do backups?).
If I’m remembering right Mint is offering to install backup-software on installation (TimeShift ?). So check there, but I doubt this would backup cloud-files.
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For cloud-storage. Check the connection using the OS and google if they keep backups. I remember deleting Backups from Dropbox some years ago. Be quick with this, if you don’t pay for storage versions are not kept long.
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Don’t rely on this.
I never died before, so it may never happen?
No idea how relevant these are, but cloud synchronization indeed bears some dangers in it:
I have seen this on Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage, but only for Calc and Impress files, and only when Microsoft apps (Powerpoint/Excel, a viewer app or the file manager “preview”) touched the file. Not likely the case for you (being on linux platform, and a Writer file), but so similar symptoms that I thought I’d mention it anyway.
The solution in those instances was to look into file version history and restore the previous version of the file. You may need to log in to cloud storage on the web to do this.
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Thank you all. The scare is luckily over =)
When I logged in through the cloud storage’s web interface (the one I used for the files is pcloud.com) the files were totally ok.
But there seemed to be an even simpler solution: renaming them in the ‘PC cloud map’ while being connected to the cloud. What I mean by ‘PC cloud map’ is that I usually have a synced folder (let’s call it JUST a ‘PC map’) on every PC but don’t connect to the cloud on start, so that if something gets wrong on one PC or in the cloud I’ll still have a copy on other PCs (untill I connect to the cloud). In this particular case I didn’t have a synced ‘PC map’, just a ‘PC cloud map’ which was only accessible when PCloud’s software was running and thus connnected.
When I renamed the files in the ‘PC cloud map’’ they went back to their normal sizes, then I just renamed them back.
Once again, thank you all.
Your cloud solution may have employed a “files on demand” feature which does not report file size correctly to your system. This kind of feature maintains the directory of file names and their file system properties on your system, but does not keep file content stored locally until you explicitly request to open it.
Linux client drivers are low priority for some services, so if that is the case for pcloud and the cause of your issues, you may want to look into this and disable files-on-demand. It is usually possible to sync just a part of the directory tree, if local storage space is an issue. In any case, report your problems to the service provider. They will be happy to know about it.