data loss. 28 page document reduced to 4 pages

markwusinich · Guest

I downloaded OO 1.1.0 onto W2k and my wife immediately started using it to create a booklet for a silent auction to benefit Alzheimer's.

This morning (four days before the event) when she opened the document it is only four pages, not the 28 she had saved last night. She has a copy of the document from the prior morning, and the version she saved last night is still large enough that it appears it has all the data. Is there anything she could have done last night that would have hidden the four pages she added yesterday?

She is well on her way to re-typing the docuement from the prior day's version, but we would both like to know what to do next time.

Thanks,

Mark Wusinich

freiheit · Posted: Wed Apr 28, 2004 9:17 pm Post subject:

I have never seen anything like this happen (thankfully). Just so you know, the .SXW file is a zip compressed archive containing a few HTML-style files within. If necessary, you can open it up in WinZip, WinRar, 7Zip, etc, etc and retrieve any data (in a rather plain text format) from one of the files within. That would at least get your wording back, if it is indeed still in the file. The formatting would need to be re-done, though.

Depending on what type of formatting was used (text frames for example) certain parts could theoretically have been marked as hidden or the frames reduced to a size that makes them invisible on the display. You might try the View menu, Hidden Paragraphs item just to see if it shows you anything.

But since I (thankfully, as I say) have never had this problem, I'm not sure how else you could avoid it in the future.
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Don "Freiheit" Eitner

ftack · Posted: Wed Apr 28, 2004 11:52 pm Post subject:

I also never experienced any data loss in OOo, and I am now using it exclusively for almost two years. Sure the doc was properly saved before closing?

nom · Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2004 1:56 am Post subject:

Funny but something similar happened to me the other day.

I have a writer document which is password protected. When I try opening it displays a message : " The document is corrupt and therefore cannot be opened. Should OpenOffice.org repair the file?" YES , NO

I click on the YES button, but then it opens an EMPTY document.

I then tried to unzip the file, bu the "header" is corrupt and will not extract....

I really do not know why this happened.

If there is a solution please let me know.

Thanks,

Nom

User · Guest

I too had something similar happen. I was by-in-large done with a pleading I was working on. When I went in over the weekend to finish it off, the document was lacking much of the recent work and looked like it was from a state from several days before. I didn't have a hard copy of my prior work so I had to redo much of it.

anvilsoup · Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2004 6:59 pm Post subject:

Check your hard drive with scandisk just in case you have bad sectors

freiheit · Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2004 7:42 pm Post subject:

If the file header is corrupt, you might try one of the myriad zip file repair tools which are available on the web. OOo files are Zip compressed.

And yes, of course it's always a good idea to be sure one's hard drive is not corrupt whenever one sees a file corruption issue.
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Don "Freiheit" Eitner