Recovered Document gone to Gibberish

[Kellyb]

Hi there,

I was working in on a .doc in Open Office when my computer died on me, I'd saved it about 3 minutes beforehand, upon recovery I was asked to ok the ASCII filter options, never had this happen before so I just clicked ok, then is came up with a Document in Use and locked for editing by an unknown user, so I opened the read only to find my document is now pages of this - ###########
I didn't know about the save/load backup until this happened so I didn't have the option clicked, not sure what else to try, any ideas or is it lost to the ether? I've attached the file for your purusal,

Thanks, Kelly

[RoryOF]

Nothing there - sorry! It is always better to work in OOo's native format; when the document is complete, then save it out to .doc format, if you must.

[Hagar Delest]

See that thread: 22 pages term paper replaced with pound signs.

I fear there is no fix.

[TheGurkha]

Every single byte in the file is a hex zero byte 0x00, so the file is 24K of nothing, I'm afraid.

It is always safer to work in the native OOo formats (.odt and .ods etc) and then use Save As to save a copy in .doc or .xls format if you need to distribute it in MS Office formats. But always then go back to the native OOo version to continue working. If the people you are sending to do not need to edit the files then it is best to send them a PDF as then no matter what office suite they use it will be possible for them to read and print the files.

Obviously, .odt files can crash too, but there is more chance of getting something back from that format. Did you have any backups?