Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 125017
Crash, corrupted Word file.
Last modified: 2017-05-20 10:11:47 UTC
I was working all day on editing an MS Word 97-2003 file, with another file opened as reference. I was saving it regularly. With no warning of any kind, Open Office Writer 4.1.0 closed itself. Now pressing Ctrl-S is somewhat of a reflex for me, so I may have pressed Ctrl-S a split second before the crash happened, not in response to it, but perhaps that was what triggered the crash. I'm not sure. It happened really quickly. When I reopened the writer, it offered to restore my two files. The reference file was fine. The one I was working on got corrupted. It said it wasn't a Word file any more. Its size went from 48 KB to 36 KB. I know it's not a lot to show for eight hours of labor, but I was editing it down for clarity and size, not writing. I was doing a lot of moving around of one-cell tables with text inside of them, and some colored text with various fonts and font sizes. Tried to change the file's extension to .odt, no luck. I had to roll back eight hours of work to a previous version Windows kept for me. Sadly, this is not acceptable of a release version. I can't work like this, saving my work every five minutes under a different file name and pray to computer gods that I won't lose it all. I thought 4.1.0 was a stable release? This is a brand new installation of a Windows 7 system on a Raid1 (mirror) array with two hard drives for extra data protection. Sorry I don't have the exact steps to reproduce the problem. I don't think "work for eight hours and wait for a crash" is an acceptable step in an STR. I love the idea of open source software, but I'm going to continue my work in Microsoft Word and calm down as hard as I can.
Thanks for the report. It is sad to hear that you had got the described problem. Unfortunately, it is hard to reproduce and thus fix the described problem without having a sample file and more detailed steps which you did before the crash occurs. It looks like that AOO crashes right in the middle of the "saving to *.doc" process. If you could provide the sample file and some more information about the actions which you performed before the crash, it may be possible to reproduce the crash and then to fix it. BTW, AOO has a feature to create automatically corresponding recovery data to restore open documents in case of a crash. in the general load/save options (Menu Tools - Options - Load/Save - General) you can activate option "Save Autorecovery information..". You can also choose the time interval. May be this option is already active and this "Autorecovery save" interfered with the manual save and thus caused the document corruption.
Since there has been no follow-up information, I am marking this as irreproducible. This is the kind of problem that we do want to treat as a Save/Shutdown problem at Issue 126869 and those sub-tasks developed from it.