It's not a feature, it's a bug!
I spent rather more time that is in any way reasonable or sensible in trying to recover a lost couple of pages yesterday. Let me just say that it was not my fault they got lost - I am anal diligent about making backups. I have backups of my backups, and for good measure I also upload things onto servers deep in the bowels of the Interwebs just in case a meteor hits the house and destroys my computer and the toaster*, and I get run over by an articulated lorry full of fish** on the way home which crushes the usb stick I carry with me at all times*** in my handbag. And naturally it goes without saying that I have the autosave and autorecovery functions enabled on my word processor. So, as you see, there is no-one who is less likely to lose two pages than me. It would take some horrible sequence of particularly unlikely events for any of my Stuff to be irretrievably lost.
The HSOPUEs goes like this: First, I get a new computer and reinstall my operating system, a slightly newer version than I was running before, with a newer version of Open Office - but - not the newest version of Open Office. My new install had Open Office version 3.0.0, and I checked that the autosave and autorecovery functions were enabled (which they were, by default, hurrah), and away I went, happily churning out unmitigated trash deathless prose until some sort of unexpected reboot shut down Open Office untidily, but that okay, because what happens then is that Open Office uses its automatic backup and recovery feature to restore the document to the very point you had reached, even if you had last saved it yourself two pages ago!
I rebooted and restarted OO, and when I opened my file, sure enough, up came the Recovery thingummy, proudly announcing that it had recovered my document, and then document opened and I looked at it and I thought "...hmmm... that doesn't look quite right. That looks rather shorter than I remember it. Where is my devastatingly amusing line about wooden spoons that I distinctly recall writing?"
So I looked in the directory where Open Office keeps its backup files, and sure enough, there it is - devastatingly-amusing-wooden-spoons.bak - the back-up of my document./ And I open it, and it's the same spoonless version with the missing two pages. And then I consult the mighty Google about Open Office's seeming failure to do the back-up thing, and discover that Open Office Version 3.0.0 has a bug - a bug, oh yes, don't those words elicit joy in the heart of every citizen of this brave new digital world - and what this bug does is to over-write the auto-recovery backup with the last manually-saved version and it does this at the point when you open your file and initiate the autorecovery.
So your file is saved and backed up, and tucked away securely in the backup directory, and if you go into this directory and copy the backup from there before you attempt to open the original file, then it is safe, hurrah, but of course you're not going to do that, because you don't know about this bug until you've opened the bloody file, found that it's missing two pages and consulted The Mighty Google!
Okay, deep breath. It's only two pages. And there are programs which can recover deleted files.
I tried four of them, in total. Some of them took hours to run, because you can't search a particular directory, you can only search the entire drive, and this drive is 500GB, and they found Stuff, oh yes indeed, lots and lots of Stuff, Stuff I hadn't seen in yonks coughHarryPotterPorncough, Stuff I had absolutely no use for, Stuff I don't even know where it came from, but the one thing it didn't find was my original devastatingly-amusing-wooden-spoons.bak file, because it hadn't been deleted, it had been over-written and for a digital document, there is no coming back from a damn good over-writing.
I expect there is somewhere, in the possession of the FBI or the KGB, some software or hardware which could recover this file, but I had already spent rather more of my rapidly-dwindling allocation of life on it than it truly deserved. In fact, if I'd put half as much time and effort into re-doing the two pages as I had into trying to recover the original ones, I'd probably have... at least four pages by now! In the meantime, I have upgraded to Open Office 3.1.1, which is apparently untroubled by this particular bug. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some amusing thoughts about wooden spoons to commit to ones and zeros...
* not an actual toaster of the type which slightly-burns bread, but a NAS storage drive
** or any other form of marine life
***which contains not only amusing wooden spoon anecdotes, but also a large selection of useful computer tools and programs, and a bootable version of Puppy Linux, because in my head, I visualise myself one day randomnly encountering an emergency computer situation, where some distraught member of the public runs into the street screaming "Oh God! My computer won't boot! Won't someone do something!!, and I elbow my way through the horrified crowd of onlookers and reach into my handbag with a cry of "stand back! I'm going to try Puppy Linux!" and.... I'm a very sad person, really. I also keep a rope in my 4x4 for the same reason.
The HSOPUEs goes like this: First, I get a new computer and reinstall my operating system, a slightly newer version than I was running before, with a newer version of Open Office - but - not the newest version of Open Office. My new install had Open Office version 3.0.0, and I checked that the autosave and autorecovery functions were enabled (which they were, by default, hurrah), and away I went, happily churning out unmitigated trash deathless prose until some sort of unexpected reboot shut down Open Office untidily, but that okay, because what happens then is that Open Office uses its automatic backup and recovery feature to restore the document to the very point you had reached, even if you had last saved it yourself two pages ago!
I rebooted and restarted OO, and when I opened my file, sure enough, up came the Recovery thingummy, proudly announcing that it had recovered my document, and then document opened and I looked at it and I thought "...hmmm... that doesn't look quite right. That looks rather shorter than I remember it. Where is my devastatingly amusing line about wooden spoons that I distinctly recall writing?"
So I looked in the directory where Open Office keeps its backup files, and sure enough, there it is - devastatingly-amusing-wooden-spoons.bak - the back-up of my document./ And I open it, and it's the same spoonless version with the missing two pages. And then I consult the mighty Google about Open Office's seeming failure to do the back-up thing, and discover that Open Office Version 3.0.0 has a bug - a bug, oh yes, don't those words elicit joy in the heart of every citizen of this brave new digital world - and what this bug does is to over-write the auto-recovery backup with the last manually-saved version and it does this at the point when you open your file and initiate the autorecovery.
So your file is saved and backed up, and tucked away securely in the backup directory, and if you go into this directory and copy the backup from there before you attempt to open the original file, then it is safe, hurrah, but of course you're not going to do that, because you don't know about this bug until you've opened the bloody file, found that it's missing two pages and consulted The Mighty Google!
Okay, deep breath. It's only two pages. And there are programs which can recover deleted files.
I tried four of them, in total. Some of them took hours to run, because you can't search a particular directory, you can only search the entire drive, and this drive is 500GB, and they found Stuff, oh yes indeed, lots and lots of Stuff, Stuff I hadn't seen in yonks coughHarryPotterPorncough, Stuff I had absolutely no use for, Stuff I don't even know where it came from, but the one thing it didn't find was my original devastatingly-amusing-wooden-spoons.bak file, because it hadn't been deleted, it had been over-written and for a digital document, there is no coming back from a damn good over-writing.
I expect there is somewhere, in the possession of the FBI or the KGB, some software or hardware which could recover this file, but I had already spent rather more of my rapidly-dwindling allocation of life on it than it truly deserved. In fact, if I'd put half as much time and effort into re-doing the two pages as I had into trying to recover the original ones, I'd probably have... at least four pages by now! In the meantime, I have upgraded to Open Office 3.1.1, which is apparently untroubled by this particular bug. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some amusing thoughts about wooden spoons to commit to ones and zeros...
* not an actual toaster of the type which slightly-burns bread, but a NAS storage drive
** or any other form of marine life
***which contains not only amusing wooden spoon anecdotes, but also a large selection of useful computer tools and programs, and a bootable version of Puppy Linux, because in my head, I visualise myself one day randomnly encountering an emergency computer situation, where some distraught member of the public runs into the street screaming "Oh God! My computer won't boot! Won't someone do something!!, and I elbow my way through the horrified crowd of onlookers and reach into my handbag with a cry of "stand back! I'm going to try Puppy Linux!" and.... I'm a very sad person, really. I also keep a rope in my 4x4 for the same reason.