Will pay for successful help for this LibreOffice file recovery problem

English
, ,
#1

Desperately hoping someone can help me recover from a stupid mistake and I will pay for successful help. Windows 10 notified me that it was going to update later that evening. I was very busy with a project & had many Calc and Writer files open. I forgot about the update and put my Windows into hibernate. Today when I came back to my computer I noticed that it looked like Windows brought itself out of hibernate, updated and rebooted.

When I opened LibreOffice it said it had a bunch of files to recover, so I hit start, watched the recovery and then finish. It usually recovers everything fine but this time it recovered documents that were not even opened at the time of the reboot. In addition, the files that were recovered and open were older versions of themselves. I then found the path where LibreOffice stores backups. I tried to double click one of those and that put LibreOffice Calc and Writer into Not Responding!

I checked the path for LibreOffice temporary files and found and found many files out there but don’t know what to do with them.

Is there any way I can recover the files that were open when Windows updated recovered? I will pay for a successful resolution to this problem. If you don’t know the answer yourself PLEASE suggest someone I can pay to help me.
Tom

#2

See my comment in Lost unsaved documents after unrequested update - #9 by EarnestAl

You might be lucky, but remember always work on copies of the files you find in case first attempt is not successful.

Personally, regardless of how urgent or important it is that I am working on, I always close everything and allow Windows to update when I first see a notification. I find it it saves time, grief, & documents. It helps to think of Windows as a toddler that wants to go to the loo; it might be able to hold on, or it might not…

3 Likes
#3

Hey EanestAI, Thanks for Responding! I found the folder you described in your comment from the previous post. In the folder your previous comment directed me to, I find 145 files! There are about 20 0K files. Most are .tmp files but some are OpenDocument Spreadsheet and OpenDocument Text files with files names for 0 to 21. Should I, copy all 145 into a different folder then rename them all as .ODT files and hope I get what I’m looking for?

Also, as I mentioned in my OP, LibreOffice Calc and Writer went into “Not Responding” mode when I tried to open a file from the backup folder. It’s been that way for a couple of hours. There are currently about 30 different Calc and Writer files open - these were opened in the failed recovery process when I discovered the problem this morning. If I use Windows Task Manager to end the LibreOffice task am I going to hurt my chance to recover the files I’m looking for? Is there any other way to close LibreOffice without doing that?

Lastly, there are 33 LibreOffice files in the folder that is in the LibreOffice backup path. The file names all end in 0 or 1. Like I said in my original post, I tried to open one and that seemed to freeze LibreOffice up. Is there anything special I need to do to open and look at these files?

Any thoughts would be MUCH appreciated!

#4

That might work.

Save as a different name or location

After Save As your files and copying the ones in Temp to another location, I would Restart Windows a second time before doing any more work. I find Windows can be flaky with only one restart after a big update.

2 Likes
#5

So, I guess I have no choice but to use Windows task manager to stop LibreOffice? Should I try to open it up again before I reboot Windows to see if it recovers anything else?

#6

I would copy the temp and the backup files to another location using File Explorer.

Did you Save As the files it recovered before trying to open more?

I wouldn’t open anything more in LO until Windows has restarted.

1 Like
#7

“Did you Save As the files it recovered before trying to open more?” Nope. I think my brain took the weekend off! I’m going to give this a shot right after I eat some dinner. If you don’t mind, please check back here for an update in 60-90 minutes. Thank you SOOOOO much for giving me some hope.

#8

Well…when I went back to OL I noticed that it came out of “Not Responding” mode so I had a chance to do a save as all the weird older files it had recovered. After I saved as all those files I shut OL down gracefully and then rebooted Windows. When Windows came back up, I opened OL and it recovered a DIFFERENT set of files – not all of the files I was working on at the time of the Windows Update but some of them…unfortunately they still did not have the latest changes. I saved as all of those and shut down OL. I then went to the folder where I copied all the temp files. I was about to start to rename them when I noticed you said to rename them all ODT. 2 questions…I do not know which of the tmp files are spreadsheets or which are documents. Also…I have setup OL to save all spreadsheets as XLS files and all documents as DOC in order to maintain compatibility with people I work with who continue to use software from the evil empire (MS). How do I rename them?

#9

I don’t know about doc and xls. I only save in that format to share, keeping the original in .odt, .ods. , etc LibreOffice format.

When LO writes to Temp it seems to create a folder along the lines of luxxxxxxxxx.tmp where x is a number or a letter. Sometimes those folders are empty, sometimes it will contain 1 or more files with a similar name, the biggest one is the one you are looking for.

It might be best to let LO decide what the file type is. So Shift+Right-click on file luxxxxxxxxx.tmp, from the context menu select Copy as path. Open LibreOffice and click Open File, paste the path into the File Open dialogue and OK.

1 Like
#10

Well…everything you suggested worked as you described. Unfortunately, the files that your process recovered did not contain my most recent changes. There were no other folders beginning with LU in the temp folder described by the path within LO that were close to today’s date. Unless you or someone else have another suggestion or another resource I can ask, I think I’m sunk. I lost a lot of work. I blame myself not LO. I think the issue could have been a memory glitch. I did have a lot of things open when I went into Hibernation before the Windows Update occurred last night. A lot of those open files were not saved with most recent changes. I learned a couple of lessons. 1) Save files or put on auto save within LO 2) When Windows notifies me of an update, save and close everything, update and then start again. I’ll be paying for these mistakes for a while as I try to recreate the lost work. Not a fun way to start the week. Still…thank you SOOO much for all of your effort to try to save me! Tom

#11

You mighty find this page helpful, Preventing data disaster - The Document Foundation Wiki

4 Likes
#12

Two final questions…will temp files generated by LO always start with LU? Also, if I look in Windows file explorer, will the “Date Modified” represent the last time that the file was updated?

#13

For me, LO creates a folder in my Temp folder with a name always beginning LU…

Inside that folder is a file (with the same name as its folder) with a .tmp extension and timestamped with the date/time I last saved the LO file.

That file is a simple .zip file: inside the zip are the files that make up a LO file (also all timestamped with the date/time I last saved the LO file).

2 Likes
#14

Thanks for responding BigRAI. I guess I was under the impression that each temp file in the temp folder beginning with LU was a file that was created automatically (even without saving) every X minutes when AutoRecovery is turned on. I thought that is where LO goes to recover files that were open (even if they were not saved) at the time of a sudden unexpected shut down. My problem is that the files in the most recent LU temp folder do not contain the most recent version of the files that were open when Windows forced my computer out of Hibernation mode to do a Windows Update. I was hoping I could find the most recent version of the files that were open but when I look in that folder, the Date Modified is from more than 2 weeks ago i.e. not the most recent versions.

#15

@tjmaurer999

FWIW I only ever had trouble with Windoze hibernation since it was introduced (Win98?).

I always disable it.

Sorry our efforts failed to recover your files.

#16

Please don’t apologize! This all was my fault for pushing my system to the edge of performance (I had probably 45 LO files open along with a ton of tabs in Firefox and Chrome). I’m guessing the combination of having close to full RAM, Hibernation and then the Windows forcing the update (all things that can be controlled by me) caused the system to fail. Thanks again for trying!!! I’m just heart sick about my work that was lost.

#17

One thing that may help you (in the future, I’m afraid) is to install the excellent TimeStamp Backup extension (created by one of AskLO’s regular contributors).


Visit http://www.flowcont.hu/LO_oxt_store/ and download & install version 1.2.2 (ignore the fact that the software title is Hungarian (so is the author !!).


You can assign a keyboard shortcut to launch the save. The only effort on your part is to get into the habit of saving a copy of your work every {whatever suits your needs} minutes. It has saved me many a time.

2 Likes
#18

See also Timestamp Backup » Extensions for an English description… unfortunately the versions downloadable from the extensions site go only up to v1.1.8, so download from the linked homepage instead.

2 Likes
#20

You can rename the “filename.bak” to add “.ods” (or .odt). LibreOffice choose what is the correct document format when opening it.

2 Likes

Impressum (Legal Info) | Datenschutzerklärung (Privacy Policy)   Content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license.