Open Office is one dangerous piece of software...

[janthree]

Man, Open Office is one dangerous piece of software. Been using OO 2.1 (and now 2.2) for several weeks now. I just lost all my changes to a spreadsheet...several hours work when I suddenly got an error message that the file couldn't be written. Had nothing to do with permissions. I am running Windows XP SP2 as Administrator. Lost it all...all the backup files are 0 bytes. Never had this problem with MS Excel. I guess I need to do my important stuff on MS Office, which is a shame because I had high hopes that OO would let me get away from MS.

[hol.sten]

[janthree]

Well, my post may have come off as a flame, but it was not intended as such and I realize that I am on an OO forum, but OO has just really scared me and you are right, maybe I have been lucky with MS Office, but I don't remember losing any MS Office files at least within the past 2 or 3 years of heavy use.

Now I am trying open source (and will be installing a GNU/Linux distro next week) because I believe MS has lost its way. Individual users have become second rate customers and the release of Vista (now that is a POC), DRM and all, was the last straw. However, what I just learned an hour or so ago was that (IMHO) OO is not as robust as MS Office as evidenced by this very unexpected crash and loss of data.

As for my file format, it was an open document spreadsheet (ods). Don't remember the exact error message number, but the text contained the statement that "File could not be written". Don't know what you are referring to about the CD, but the latest six spreadsheet files in my backup folder were zero bytes, except for one very early version which was essentially the original that I started editing from. Now, for what it is worth, I did add a button to the formatting toolbar while I was working on the document, although I don't see how that would relate to losing my file.

As for working as Administrator, I do understand the risk, but Windows is a pain to deal with unless you have complete privileges to the system. It is a real disadvantage of Windows and another good reason to move to GNU/Linux.

I guess the overall point is that someone new to OO and open source in general is easily spooked by these kind of events…especially when it comes to transitioning from MS Office to Open Office for real work.

[romunov]

Which reminds me I always have to do backups, no matter what OS or progy I use.

[noranthon]

I have come across one feature in OOo that I consider dangerous (the so-called crash "recovery" feature). I've never come across the problem you mention.

It seems to me that users of OOo need to back up their work fairly frequently but the same could probably be said of all software. Operating systems and partitioning systems are definitely not so dependable that you can dispense with back-ups.

The whole business is fraught with difficulty.
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[DaveRD]

Just a thought without any guarantees, you could try a program used to recover lost or deleted files in Windows. It even works if deleted by a virus and many other scenarios. It might work, it might not. But it would be worth a try.

Recuva
http://www.recuva.com/

Avira UnErase
http://www.free-av.com/antivirus/allinonen.html

Both of these work quite well. Best of luck.

[thomasjk]

I've been using OpenOffice for over a year now and have never had any issue of the type you describe. Have you run chkdsk /r on your hard drive? Something has corrupted the files.

[acknak]

Have a look at this thread and see if any of it might apply to you:
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=54930

This kind of problem just blows my mind.

[bobharvey]

[janthree]

First, I want to thank everyone for their input. I have been following up (and taking notes) on your suggestions. I figured I might get trashed for being critical of OO on this forum, but I have gotten some very helpful responses.

From my perspective, the number one capability of any office type suite should be very robust protection from data loss. I can put up with glitches and even app crashes to some extent, as long as I don't lose a significant amount of my work. But, as I am sure everyone knows, it can be very…very…very frustrating when hours of work vanishes for no apparent reason (at least no reason that the user can discern).

I spent the day and recreated the work I did yesterday. From now on I plan to periodically exit OO and manually make backups of my working files, so if it crashes again, I won't have to repeat as much work. As I mentioned earlier, I plan to move my work over to a GNU/Linux distro (SimplyMepis 6.5 when it goes final in a week or two.), so if it is a Windows specific issue then I won't have to worry about it any more. Man, I hope it goes well…I so want to get away from Windows.

[DeShock]

I am no power user of OpenOffice, but I do regularly check these forums to learn what from others issues about the software. I can say I have never seen a post describing your problem. Sounds like a freak occurance and not the type of thing one should expect from OpenOffice.
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WinXP Home SP2, OOo 2.3.0, Firefox 2, Thunderbird 2

[noranthon]

[DoxBrian]

I haven't lost any data as a result, but I've run into the "unable to write data" type of situation a few times with OO/SO now. Pretty annoying, but not so frequent as to annoy me enough to quit using it

This is on Solaris 10 (SPARC) and the problem is intermittant. If I try again a minute later, it'll be fine...

[PAn]

I think that since ODF format was introduced OO is a waste. I have been using it exclusively from 1,2 dumping MS back then. I have paperles office in my bussines: I keep ALL data in 10 Calc files. No documents no bussines.
2weeks ago I have migrated everything to Linux. For a week It was OK then I got first treat: "Read error. Format error dicovered in the file in sub document...." This makes document unreadable. You can unzip it and manually repair line 2801591.
Back to windows. Got the same message as the first poster: error message that the file couldn't be written. (I had it a couple of times before) Basically you loose all work. Looked up for backup. It was nice 0 byte size. Since you can close the file without saving I did that. Repeated opening of a 456kb draw file openes blank new document!
I avoid auto recovery since I lost all graphical data in the process once. Dozens of pictures used in production document.
So for the first time in years I think of moving back. Excel was just crashing, Calc destroys data. Since I back up regulary no big damage was done yet. But I have more important work to do than guard my data against malfunctioning program.
Searching the forums I have found this is not so uncommon.

[Angel Blue01]

I must be pretty lucky. I've never had any serious probmes with the document recovery function. It also work pretty well in MS Office. I don't expect it to work work well, nor the one in MS Office.
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People I know using OpenOffice.org: 6 not counting myself