Libre office calc

[manin1952]

Hi,

I was working in libre office the past 2-3 days without powering off my pc.
Today we had a power loss so my pc went off..

Now I turned on, I saw that all my work from these days was not saved...Yes I pressed several times to save it
during my working!!!!

What the hell happened? Is there any way That I can recover it?

Thanks

Libre office calc
Version: 24.2.7.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 420(Build:2)
CPU threads: 4; OS: Linux 6.11; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Locale: en-US (en_US.UTF-8); UI: en-US
Ubuntu package version: 4:24.2.7-0ubuntu0.24.04.2
Calc: threaded

manin@manin-ESPRIMO-P557:~$ uname -a
Linux manin-ESPRIMO-P557 6.11.0-17-generic #17~24.04.2-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Mon Jan 20 22:48:29 UTC 2 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

 

[CaffeineAddict]

Yes I pressed several times to save it during my working!!!!

Saved where?
it could be you were saving your document to different location on your drive. check your directories.

 

[Brickwizard]

I Loose things occasionally, buy if I wind up the office suite and all i do is open office, top left open file then click on open they are usually there.

 

[manin1952]

Saved where?
it could be you were saving your document to different location on your drive. check your directories.

Saving the document at the location it is...
Pressing the save button

 

[manin1952]

I Loose things occasionally, buy if I wind up the office suite and all i do is open office, top left open file then click on open they are usually there.

No, it is not!!!

 

[MikeRocor]

My /home directory is in RAM, so if I lose power without backing it up to persistent media, I lose stuff. I invested in a nice big UPS, so that (almost) never happens. With a laptop (assuming a working main battery) that's not such an issue.

I'm not an ubuntu user, but I'm pretty sure that with it, your home directory is already on persistent media so that's probably not the issue.

Things that might cause your spreadsheet saves to be somewhere else (grasping at straws here):

• Were you running calc as root? If so, look in root's home directory
• Were you running calc on another box (via ssh w/X forwarding)? If so, look on that other box.

Not that I've ever done these things and forgotten it wasn't just a regular session.

 

[Condobloke]

I have an app on my pc called:

catfish file search

It is available from some distros repository....eg, Linux Mint....and also : https://docs.xfce.org/apps/catfish/start

Via the menu on the left side you can make sure you get to search everywhere

HTH

When I read your post, I felt your pain.

 

[osprey]

Hi,

I was working in libre office the past 2-3 days without powering off my pc.
Today we had a power loss so my pc went off..

Now I turned on, I saw that all my work from these days was not saved...Yes I pressed several times to save it
during my working!!!!

What the hell happened? Is there any way That I can recover it?

Thanks

Libreoffice calc files are usually saved with the suffix .ods. If this default wasn't altered and the files were saved using the libreoffice menu item for save, then one could find all the files with this suffix in one's home directory with a command like:

find $HOME -name "*.ods"

Then one can check to see if the "saved" files exist. The output of the command could be redirected to a file if there are a lot of such files which could make it easier to navigate through the found files.

 

[charlie.corder]

Greetings @manin1952 ,
Just like Condobloke, I can feel your pain, as I have been down that path - once. Sorry I can't help in answering your question; I can only give some fatherly advice: When I work on something important I always save my stuff to a usb drive connected to my cp. That was the lesson I learned from losing something I was working on. {Yes, I do use LibreOffice a lot; both Calc and Writer}.
Hope you can recover what you were doing.
Old Geezer
TC

 

[KGIII]

I do have another idea that may be worth checking...

If you open Calc and try to save the new document, is it saved in a different path than you expected?

When I work on something important I always save my stuff to a usb drive connected to my cp. That was the lesson I learned from losing something I was working on. {

If it's really important, I like to save things in multiple locations. So, I'll save twice - once to the Documents directory and once to a backup drive.

What's weird is that, as far as I know, Calc periodically saves the file in its own directory so that you can recover the document after a crash. When a crash happens, it offers to recover the last document you were working on. That's what I remember, at any rate.

 

[Mike-W0BTU]

I was working in libre office the past 2-3 days without powering off my pc.
Today we had a power loss so my pc went off..

Whether or not you find the file, may I suggest that you invest in a battery backup unit. I have one on everything on the network here, and the best one is on my computer.

One never knows what surges, dropouts, and wild excursions that your electricity may take. Where I live, overvoltages, undervoltages, and total blackouts have become way too common in the past year. (After our rates went up. What a coincidence. :-(

I feel your pain, my friend. That's happened in my household more than once. Here's hoping you'll find something you can use.

I recall once, when I came to the point where I had to re-create a lost file, it was amazing how my brain kicked into gear and rewrote it. That's of course not always possible. (Especially at my age, but that's another story.)

 

[GatorsFan]

By default LibreOffice saves your file to /home/username/Documents unless you change it and select "Save As"

 

[Fanboi]

If it doesn't prompt you to restore your document when you restarted and fired up LO (as others mentioned, it saves backup version -- actually they may be patch files for your doc to save space, never bothered to look that one up) and, more confusing, is if it's not under File --> Recent Documents, are you absolutely sure you saved and saw it save (bottom bar) as opposed to pressing Ctrl + S? Maybe you didn't press down properly or your Ctrl key is stuffed? Could happen to anyone.

Moving on, and I bring this up as new users tend to be in the Windows habbit of saving things in weird places. Did you save it in /tmp/? If you saved it in /tmp/, which is user-writable, you mightn't have realised this, so I guess this is a warning to stumblers of this thread: /tmp/ is cleared each reboot.

Also if you're using a ramfs as @MikeRocor mentioned he does (our lightweight distros can be double-edged), things can get dangerous unless you've a laptop or UPS. You may want to check how you configured things (maybe unwittingly).

I suggest you provide a few more details on config. May help in figuring out what went wrong.

Final notes:

• Excuse the statement of the obvious, but it is possible, esp if using an HDD, that your filesystem got damaged. Ext4 and similar journaling FSes will "self-heal" (mostly) but the data may be corrupt or removed during repair. It may also still (partially) exist in that case. There are tools to try and recover data, so I'd avoid mounting the disk if it's critical data.
• Finally, write-delays. It's unlikely given you've been running it 2 days, but just putting it out there. I've had it happen when removing a USB stick where a file's been corrupted. I now make a point manually running sync before unmounting anything.

Optional Epilogue:

Spoiler

You can get a low-cost cloud service, and unless you're leaking CIA docs, a decent cloud sync with versioning will save you tears. Like Mega's was a few EUR when I signed up for the lowest tier (400GB which is plenty for my docs and pictures) and it's costing me ~110 ZAR (exchange rate dependant) p/m which is like about 6 USD. Get a physical backup, too, as you never know when your internet may play up. Really, you can never have too much redundancy, you can never ever have too much redundancy, you can only have too little redundancy, you can only ever, ever have too little redundancy. Did you know you can never have too much redundancy? ... Anyway, jokes aside, it's important to back things up. I used to have over 100 DVDs of "snap shots" of my videos, photos, docs dirs because I had no internet and my flashdrive wasn't big enough (2GB -- that was big in those days, mind you).

 

[Mike-W0BTU]

Have you looked in /lost+found ?

I'm assuming that you have an ext4 filesystem.

 

[manin1952]

Hello,

unfortunately my work is gone...I have checked every way you and others mentioned and I did not find anything...
The strange is that, that day I had two ods files opened...The one I lost and another one, not so important..
I was working with both of them for 3 days...But only one's data were lost....

Thanks for your help!!!

 

[bob466]

When creating a Document or anything else in LibreOffice do this...

Start Doc..Cal...then go to ...File...Save As...Name it...Select where to save it eg Desktop and click...Save bottom right.

Your work is saved...you just add more content and click Save now and then...easy.

If I start a Doc or anything else and just click...Save...it names it Untitled...so must be user error.

 

[manin1952]

When creating a Document or anything else in LibreOffice do this...

Start Doc..Cal...then go to ...File...Save As...Name it...Select where to save it eg Desktop and click...Save bottom right.

Your work is saved...you just add more content and click Save now and then...easy. View attachment 24466

If I start a Doc or anything else and just click...Save...it names it Untitled...so must be user error. View attachment 24467

The strange thing is that it wasn't a new calc file...It was saved before, reopened and worked for 2-3 days before the power loss...