I was working on a relational algebra assignment in LibreOffice Writer the last few days and spent a lot of time doing it. I was saving it every hour or less while I've been working on it (although not backing it up since I only backup to a flash drive once a week - any suggestions for backing up homework files automatically would be appreciated although not the reason I'm here). I was hibernating my computer the last couple of days since I had a lot of windows open to help with the assignment. Every time I saved, the formatting didn't change. But once I saved a last time and then closed the window to go submit the assignment I went back just to double check everything before I handed it in. At this point, I realized all the formatting involving right subscripts was gone and possibly more as well (I created the formatting by going to Insert -> Object -> Formula -> Formats). This was probably caused by saving the file with the .doc extension but I didn't think it would change when I closed the window if it hadn't changed while I was saving with the window open. Normally I would have saved with the usual .odt extension but that wasn't an option for submitting the assignment.
I'm using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Can anybody offer any suggestions as to how to recover the version before I closed the window or how to fix the problem in some other way? I really don't want to have to spend an entire day or more doing the assignment over again and losing more points for being late. Thanks for taking the time to help.
41 Answer
I'm afraid there's a reason it recommends to save as .odx. I had (and reported to their bugtracker) a similar problem, except in my case it has to do with the formatting of the table of content. I don't think you can restore it, because it simply wasn't saved in the file.
LibreOffice tries its best to support proprietary formats such as .doc, but it may miss something since supporting proprietary formats requires reverse-engineering.
Another important note: due to LTS you're using an ancient Office, the 5.1.6 version was released in 2016 year. Latest LibreOffices at the time of your question were 6.0.5 and 5.4.7. Newer LO has of course better compatibility. So please upgrade to LO from their downloads page, and test if the problem you encountered is still present. If it is, please consider reporting a bug.
