Apparently the LibreOffice bug described in the previous posts is still in operation on version 5.3. The other day, while I was working in a document in LibreOffice 5.3 a split-second outage made my computer shut down. The 'save auto-recovery information every' field was selected and set at 10-minutes interval. I also and saved the document more often. Power outages had happened to me dozens of times while working on OpenOffice and other word processors, and the file recovery process was always capable of recovering most of the work. When I turned the computer on again the usual recovery window appeared (like on other word processors) informing me of the recovery process. I followed the steps carefully and expected to lose only a few minutes of work, but when the document opened there were several pages of work missing. It was almost the same document I had opened hours ago. Several hours of hard work just gone. There wasn't any backup of temp file or anything to retrieve an earlier version. I couldn't believe that happened.
It wasn't a virus at all or anything other than a LibreOffice serious defect. That clearly shows that LibreOffice recovery function doesn't work, and attempting 'recovery' will only cause a large loss of data, even data saved manually while the document is open. This is a very serious bug, and in striking contrast with the most popular word processors, which, in my experience, always recover all data saved before the interval set in load/save options. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to libreoffice in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/817326 Title: [Upstream] Previously-saved LibreOffice document lost by power outage (became 0 bytes long) - LibreOffice should call fsync Status in LibreOffice: Fix Released Status in libreoffice package in Ubuntu: Fix Released Bug description: I was working on a document in LibreOffice today while my battery was low and so I was frequently saving, which I thought would help me if I lost power. However, when I eventually did lose power and later rebooted, the document had become 0 bytes long. LibreOffice was not able to restore the auto-saved copy either. As a result, I have lost a whole week of notes for one of my courses. After researching online, it seems that this is caused by the application not calling fsync() (or fdatasync()) when saving files. Due to delayed allocation in modern filesystems, there is no guarantee that the new file's data has actually been written to disk unless the application calls fsync. So if an app writes a new file and replaces the old one with it without fsync'ing the new one first then there is a window of opportunity during which a power failure will result in the loss of BOTH versions of the file. In ext4 this window is also much larger than in ext3. Theodore Tso blogged about this at http://ldn.linuxfoundation.org /blog-entry/delayed-allocation-and-zero-length-file-problem and http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news- media/blogs/browse/2009/03/don%E2%80%99t-fear-fsync. He strongly recommends to call fsync in this situation. Please update LibreOffice to fsync() saved files so that other users do not lose their data like I did. ProblemType: Bug DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04 Package: libreoffice-core 1:3.3.2-1ubuntu5 ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.42-generic 2.6.38.2 Uname: Linux 2.6.38-8-generic x86_64 Architecture: amd64 Date: Wed Jul 27 21:37:02 2011 InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release amd64 (20100429) ProcEnviron: LANGUAGE=en_US:en LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SHELL=/bin/bash SourcePackage: libreoffice UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to natty on 2011-04-29 (89 days ago) To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/df-libreoffice/+bug/817326/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
