Document Recovery

Jon Light (deceased) · Post by **Jon Light (deceased)** » 21 Jan 2016 9:59 am

Win10, Open Office

I opened an old saved business letter for the purpose of using it as a template. I overwrote the entire thing, creating a new document, and printed it out. I intended to "save as" and give it a new name. I accidentally hit "save" instead, thus wiping out the original document. Being a long letter with many edits, I didn't have enough 'undo's to recover the original letter.

As luck would have it, I have real-time backup onto an external drive and I found the original, not overwritten, and everything was ok.

If I had not had the backup, were there any other 'user friendly' options for clawing back from this mistake? Hitting 'save' instead of 'save as' was way too simple a mistake to make.

Dave Potter · Post by **Dave Potter** » 21 Jan 2016 11:02 am

First thing I'd do, after experiencing this kind of thing, would be to make a mental note that, given that you expect to be making extensive changes to an original document, as soon as you open the original, and before any changes, do a "Save As" immediately. Then, anything you do to the loaded document will affect the new one, not the original.

You may want to check your settings. "Tools/OpenOffice/Memory" shows the settings for number of Undos, among other things. Mine defaults to 100 Undos, and I haven't changed it; I doubt I'd ever need that many. See what yours is set to, and increase it, if what's there isn't enough.

Jon Light (deceased) · Post by **Jon Light (deceased)** » 21 Jan 2016 11:12 am

Excellent idea re: making the 'save as' my first move. I'm amazed I haven't made this mistake before and I can easily see doing it again. That would inoculate me.

I'll go see if there are any useful options but when I went for the undo, 99 was the number and that didn't do it. I guess the question is 99 what? Keystrokes? Words? I'll investigate but whatever it was, it wasn't enough.

Jon Light (deceased) · Post by **Jon Light (deceased)** » 21 Jan 2016 11:15 am

I just changed it to 500. That ought to cover it.

Dave Potter · Post by **Dave Potter** » 21 Jan 2016 1:45 pm

Jon Light wrote:I'll go see if there are any useful options but when I went for the undo, 99 was the number and that didn't do it. I guess the question is 99 what? Keystrokes? Words? I'll investigate but whatever it was, it wasn't enough.

Playing with it just now, it's not always easy to know what will get "Undone". Usually, it's whatever you last did on the keyboard. Sometimes, it's the last word you typed. If you highlight a group of words and click "undo", it will un-highlight the group. Just think about what you last did, and expect "Undo" to "undo" it. Last consecutive keystrokes might be close to what gets "Undone".

It's a case of "Ya pays yer money, and ya takes yer chances.

Scott Duckworth · Post by **Scott Duckworth** » 21 Jan 2016 2:58 pm

If you make a template, and want to save it, do "Save As" and select the "ott" as the file type. Once it is save, find the file and right click it. In the properties select "Read Only". That should keep you from overwriting it.

Jon Light (deceased) · Post by **Jon Light (deceased)** » 21 Jan 2016 4:29 pm

Actually, the entire foolproofing comes with the saving as .ott . Bingo. I've not been doing this but....that is what it's for! I'll save documents as .odt but I'll open templates, not old documents when I'm making a new document. Duh.

I'm still wondering if there was anything more I could have done to try to recover the lost document if I hadn't found it in my backup drive. Something that I could have done--not something that a pro could do. I surely wouldn't be the first idiot to hit save instead of save as.