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Sunday, July 5, 2009

OpenOffice Emergency

After a full weekend of major revisions and rewrites on a large project, and mere minutes before I was going to be saving and backing up my files Open Office crashed.

Then, re-opening the file, it's blank. 500 pages gone. GONE.

I have backups, yes. Yes, I do. They do not have the full 3 day weekend spent in revisions and edits.

I need help.

NOW.

3 comments:

K.C. Shaw said...

Yikes. I use Open Office too and have never had this problem. You've probably already tried all the suggestions below, but just in case, here they are.

Have you tried closing the file, rebooting the computer, and reopening it? It may be a display issue rather than an actual blank document. You might also make sure the text didn't get changed to white instead of black somehow. Also, check the size of the document. If it's truly blank, it'll look like a very small document, like a few K.

Try saving a copy of the file and opening it on another computer. That might clear up any display problems. You might also try saving it as a .doc or .rtf (or something else it's not already saved as) to see if that knocks something loose.

Good luck. I really hope you can get your changes back.

J m mcdermott said...

I've managed to recover much of the lost data in AbiWord... But I know that this is a very unstable WP at high word counts, and I'm skittish because I can't get it to open in OO, at all!

Great. Just great.

Unknown said...

OpenOffice, like Word, automatically saves work while using it. I'm sure there is a backup copy somewhere on your hard drive. Good luck. Thanks again for your story, "I Am Nature." I'm going to be ordering your debut novel. Thanks!