[Tutorial] How to recover corrupted, broken, lost or deleted files, and those with hashes (#####)

[JohnHa]

See [Tutorial] How to find and un-delete Writer temporary files for instructions on how to identify and un-delete the temporary files Writer wrote while you were editing the file, and then deleted.

You should be able to recover all or most of the file.

This works for corrupted Writer files including those opening with ######, files broken when LO or the PC crashes and files deleted in error. It should also work for Calc, Impress etc files.

A file full of ##### is actually full of NUL characters and has no user data left in it. When LO opens such a file it displays the NUL characters as #.

Report.odt

[EasyTrieve]

Hi. I wanted to chime in with another available option.

I wanted a backup method for LO which did these:

• Generated a snapshot history (with multiple multiple options for recovery),
• Where snapshot timing was under my control, not automatic,
• Which also works for Base, and most importantly,
• Where each snapshots could be given a comment to say: what work was completed when the snapshot was taken.

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Based on work from others before me, I developed AnnotatedBackups for LibreOffice.

AnnotatedBackups is still in the testing phase, but you can try it out and see if it works for you. I use it all of the time now.

AnnotatedBackups received an update yesterday improving how it works, adding some additional sanity checks, and making it a little easier to setup and maintain long term. I hope to soon plug the one known bug that remains which relates to open Base Reports. Open Forms are already closed before the snapshot is taken.

Use and installation instructions are in this GitHub Wiki page.

IMPORTANT: With every backup methodology, it’s only as good as the testing you do to make sure it works. So YOU should check your backups from time to time to see if they can be properly restored, and thus to make 100% sure, that your recovery method will work when the time comes.

Hope this helps someone.

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@JohnHa, Thanks for your tutorial to discuss this important issue.