Writer DELETED some files/folders?

English
#1

I was working in a text document. I don’t recall exactly what I did. I think I was trying to open an existing file to view and edit. Or, I may have invoked a menu command through right-click and chose from there, I am just not sure. I tend to recall that I was simply trying to open an existing text document by browsing my drive and choosing a file within a folder like I have done a thousand times. But it didn’t do it right, something else got invoked and it kind of locked up. No matter how I tried to click on “cancel” or whatever the menu choice was to stop the operation, it continued “spinning” and I could not stop it. This went on for several minutes until it finally stopped.

From this point forward, I am missing a lot of files, including a key folder that is several years old that I transferred to this laptop and contains hundreds or thousands of documents.

Anyone have any idea what could have possibly happened and what I can do to find my missing files/folders? I have searched every way I know how to find them through Explorer, but I do NOT see them. I also did not see them in Recycle bin. This is Windows 11 Home.

What the heck, this is crazy and most unfortunate. (Yes, I have a backup but there are several days of edits that existed only on this laptop that may not be backed up anywhere, possibly.)

#2

LibreOffice and its components such as Writer will never, ever delete anything.

It’s good that you have backup copies. But how can someone give you advice if you can’t remember what you’ve done?

To be better prepared for the future, read here:

Preventing data disaster

1 Like
#3

I was working in Writer. To answer your question… the answer is a question… How could this possibly happen? Bizarre. I don’t know what it did for several minutes but now I can’t find them. I used to open a file from the key folder several times a day, used it a lot. I am 99% sure I was simply trying to open a file in that folder, something I have done many, many times. Assume it’s like this… File/Open and then I choose the file by browsing and at that moment, something else happened and that is when it started the operation that lasted several minutes.

By the way… just remembered… OneDrive is a vague recollection of that moment. Something to do with OneDrive. How could this get invoked within Writer? And I have no idea what happened. I cannot find the files/folder in OneDrive either.

#4

Delete key also works in the Open file dialog.
So, you may try an unerase/undelete tool in your hard drive.
Don’t write anything to your drive until you recover your files.

2 Likes
#5

Using Writer is the thing you see, but opening a file utilises MS-Explorer. And if you dig deeper in your system there is a lot more happening than just LO-Writer.
.
End of last year it was at several occasions impossible to SaveAs, while saving by Macro or regular Save was possible. I could even switch to “use LibreOffice dialogue” and then SaveAs.
.
There will usually be no possibility to find the cause for loosing your file afterwards…

2 Likes
#6

I installed recovery software and, yep, found 778 deleted files! These were the ones I was looking for. This is so strange that this happened. I do think it had something to do with OneDrive, which I don’t even use. Somehow, as I was trying to open a file, which I do countless times a week, a Delete operation was initiated and I could NOT stop it. I kept trying to stop it! I wasn’t even sure what was going on but I didn’t like this operation occurring and I did not ask for it! What is strange to me is that this operation happened… it did not show any kind of “confirm” screen/box such as “You are about to delete 778 files, are you sure you want to do this?” It just happened in a flash and I was in panic mode… like, what the heck just happened! The software I used is EaseUS Data Recovery. Now, I will peruse these files to see if there are any that are not in my backups; that was my fear… losing files that had not been included in a backup.

EDIT: I have not understood why none of these files were in Recycle bin. Got me to thinking… maybe these files, all along, have resided in OneDrive and when they got deleted, they were just deleted from OneDrive and did not go to Recycle min; I do not know OneDrive works in that regard.

#7

OneDrive may indeed have been at play in this. Understanding how OneDrive (and cloud storage in general) works, what to do and what not, is useful.
When Onedrive is activated on your system (which will happen almost “by default” when you set up a new Windows system), you have three distinct elements which (to add to the confusion) all carry the name “OneDrive”:

  • A folder on your computer where all apps can save files for “cloud sync”.
  • A “cloud folder”, also accessible by web page login
  • An app which will start automatically when you log in, and which synchronizes all changes between the folder - with subfolders - on your computer and the corresponding cloud folder. (This is usually the most efficient way to access the cloud storage.)

So, when something is deleted from the cloud storage, this change will propagate to your computer, and vice versa. Your files disappear. Some quite common pitfalls:

  • Have you deleted your files from an old computer while sync was still active, because “I have my files on the new computer now”?
  • Have you shared your cloud storage with other users (family, company, etc.) who may accidentally have deleted from cloud folder?
  • Did you remove files from local storage, because “they are safely in the cloud now”?

It is also worth noting that on my systems OneDrive has a history of “emptying out” files (file name still present but size=zero) in particular situations. Microsoft has had a fix for some time now so it has not been a problem for me the last year or so. Also, this does not seem to be the problem you are describing. Just saying that complex systems/workflows do not always behave perfectly as intended.

3 Likes

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