Non recovery of data from Autorecovery facility

[TheSaxon]

Hello, I have recently been encountering an annoying problem for which I hope someone can suggest a remedy.
I have a very large spreadsheet in which I have set the Autorecovery facility to save the data every 20 minutes. This works fine. However, on a couple of occasions (including today), a PC problem has caused Calc to hang forcing me to reload the application. Upon reload, the spreadsheet loads not from the latest autosaved version as I would expect but from the version at the start of the previous session. This means that I have to re-input all the data again.
Anyone any idea why this is? It seems the Autorecovery does not work! or have I got the wrong impression of what this facility is for?
TIA
Regards
John

[Phil_]

Hi,

the autosave and recovery features are quite weird things...
Moreover, there have been changes in their behavior over the versions, and I could not find a detailed and accurate documentation about it so far.

The recovery function (that goes into action after crashes) apparently does not use the results of the periodic autosave actions.

So indeed, a newer version of the document (coming from the last autosave action) could be found in the backup folder:
C:\Documents and settings\phil\Application data\OpenOffice.org2\user\backup
(supposing your Windows user name (login name) being "phil" and your system drive being C: )

I have assumed you work under Windows. If not, then you may have to search for the folder path...

The backup files all have the extension .bak. Just copy the file, if it's there, to some document folder using Windows Explorer, and then rename the extension to the original name, e.g. to .ods for Calc files. Then you should be able to normally open the file.
NB: It is no problem if you use the wrong extension, e.g. .odt instead of .ods - OOo recognizes the correct file format anyway.

See also the discussion in this thread for some background information.

HTH!
phil
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