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I have lost 4 hours of painstaking work. My computer crashed. When I reopened the file there were so many other things going on that I think I inadvertently discarded a recovered version of the file. I do not know for sure. Is there anyway I can repeat the recovery process?

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Well, if you discarded the restore-version, that means that openoffice cleared the temporary file in those pathes DataPimp told you. If OpenOffice crashes and gets back up, it looks out this places for in-work-documents and aks you for restore - copy back the edited information into ram and/or into the original file.

Your only true chance will be to use some kind of file-restore/undelete, thats recovers files from fat and ntfs filesystems. Everything you do on the system that uses hard disk space could overwrite the freed space where your to-recover-file lies in. So better search a tool that does not need to be installed and runs right of from USB-stick, download on another computer since download uses temporary space on filesystem... but you know...

Hope this helps you a little bit and you get your work restored.

Hint: OpenOffice has a mechanism to autosave a document every 5 minutes or like. Just start editing a larger file with saving the empty file to the targed destination, than a crash will cost you not more than 5 minutes of your work.

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Thanks you confirmed my suspicions. I think the autosave is on by default and I think it really tried to help me till something went awry with the 10 billion windows that opened up at me when the computer rebooted. I may have discarded the correctly recovered document and retained the 4 hour old document. – IThink Mar 18 '10 at 3:20
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up vote 5 down vote

Well since you mentioned your computer crashed, Im going to assume you are using windows. check for a backup folder located in: XP: C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\OpenOffice.org\3\user\ Vista or Win7: C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\OpenOffice.org\3\user

If that doesnt work you can always try a program called Recuva which helps restore deleted files.

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+1 for your assume to windows because of crashing. – BeowulfOF Mar 18 '10 at 2:04
Yip it was windows although a little more complicated than that. I have a WYSE thin client running Windows 7 embedded connecting with remote desktop to a virtual machine running on a windows server (2008?). I looked in those locations and could not find anything useful. I believe that openoffie must have a temporary file somewhere that it gets rid of after a recovery. But I could not find that file and I do not know what it calls it. I tried looking for it in the recycle bin but came up with no leads. – IThink Mar 18 '10 at 3:15
@BeowulfOF: I also upvoted this for the same reason. LOL – Alexander Burke Mar 18 '10 at 4:52
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