Recover lost or corrupt LibreOffice doc files (or any deleted media files)

Today I had the great misfortune of suffering a power based computer crash just after lunch. I’ve been writing a huge educational document for a client but I wasn’t too bothered because I’d been saving manually fairly frequently and I’d also got the options set to keep a backup copy.

After rebooting I was somewhat dismayed to find that my doc file couldn’t be auto-recovered by LibreOffice. In fact it’d changed to 0 bytes long! I tracked down the auto-backup files and found them in

/home/mike/.libreoffice/3/user/backup

Unfortunately they were all 0 bytes too 😦 After some rapid passing through of the stages of denial, anger, despair and finally acceptance accompanied with a fair amount of swearing I realised that the file contents were likely still there on the disk but not in a file. What I needed was a bit of forensic disk analysis to try and recover at least some of my content. If you’re on linux you can do this fairly easily using foremost originally intended for law enforcement purposes and kindly provided by the US Government.

If you’ve not already got foremost then you need to install it

sudo apt-get install foremost

You then need to know which partition your file was on, just run a mount command and see which partition is mounted on the bit of directory structure your file was in. If you haven’t got a clue what any of this means it’s probably the one near or at the top of the output of mount that says something like

$ mount
/dev/sda1 on / type ext4

Then you can use foremost to scan the partition looking for things like “doc”s and recover them to a folder somewhere. So next create a folder to put the recovered files:

mkdir ~/recovered

Then it’s time to scan.

sudo foremost -t doc -i /dev/sda1 -o /home/mike/recovered

The folder “recovered” will start (very slowly if you’ve got a big disk) filling up with recovered files named things like 646546789.doc. Hopefully one of these will be a recent copy of your missing file. If you find one that is, it’s worth looking through the others as some of them might be later versions. All in all I only lost a paragraph of about 6 lines in my doc after recovery 🙂

Top tip: the less you use your computer between realising you need to do a recovery operation and doing this set of steps the more luck you’ll have recovering missing content.

Good luck 😀

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