Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 110399
Warn user to "Please verify if your document has been properly recovered" after recovery.
Last modified: 2013-08-07 14:38:26 UTC
Hello! After a crash of OOo, the documents were claimed correctly restored (see also P.S.). To be precise, OOo displayed a message about a crash and said that the documents will be saved, and the progress bar confirmed the process of saving. However all math formulas were lost - see the attachment pochodne38.odt (e.g. simple formulas on p. 12 and 16, or more complex on p. 23 and others). I realize, that sometimes this is not possible to restore files correctly. But please, make sure the user is warned clear enough that the file is partly corrupted. I would prefer in this case to get back to a previous copy properly saved (I attach it as P38BAK.ZIP); in the actual situation I worked almost an hour with a bad file, and now I will have to do this work again. Alfa333, a user of OOo 3.2.0 OOO320m12 (Build:9483), WinXP Pro SP2. P.S. Well, this is possible that the message I have seen did not read "Documents restored correctly", but possibly I have read what I expected. So please, if the docs are restored incorrectly, the message window should look completely differently - perhaps with much red colour, big letters etc.
Created attachment 68551 [details] File incorrectly restored: placeholders instead math formulas
Created attachment 68552 [details] Previous contents of the file pochodne38.odt
Sorry, I thought that the names of attached files will be visible. The first attachment, described "File incorrectly restored: placeholders instead math formulas", is referred to in my preceedeing post as pochodne38.odt. The second attachment, described "Previous contents of the file pochodne38.odt" is what I called P38BAK.ZIP.
@alfa333: we have to distinguish 2 problems here: the crash and the missing formulas after recovery. Maybe - probably - your document crashed while saving *because* the formulas have been deleted in the background - for whatever reason. This is this reason we have to find. Then we will be able to avoid the crash. But the recovery cannot "invent" objects which don't exist anymore. Else AFAIK the recovery says "*trying* to recover" which is done when a document can be opened again but it gives no guaranty about the same content as before (which we cannot verify). Sum up: can you reproduce the crash? If you can we can try to reproduce it on our side and fix it. Else there is not a lot of chance we can do anything.
The problem here is to recognize that the file is corrupted. Empty embedded objects could be a symptom, but from other side it is still a valid ODF document if I am not wrong. From other side, as es has already mentioned, by repairing of corrupted documents the office says already that it "tries" to repair the document. The crash-recovery should also pay attention to possibility that something could go wrong during the recovery. I would say that the sentence should recommend the user to check the restored document before storing, to see that the document is still OK.
@es: I don't see a way to reproduce the crash (most of my crashes happen in different circumstances). And this was the first case that the recovery was not satisfactory (so my vigilance was relaxed). I suggest to display different messages in two distinct situations: - if OOo has completed autosave before the crash and is using so saved files for the recovery, then these files are reliable (except that results of a few minutes of the user's work are lost) - in this case the message (forgive me, if the following translation from Polish does not precisely match the English message) "The files were restored correctly" is fully justified. - if OOo tries to save the files AFTER detecting troubles (like it was in my case), then perhaps there is a danger of unreliable saving. In this case the user should be effectively warned (e.g. with big red letters) that he/she should verify the file (this corresponds to mav's post, above). This message should also present a way, in which (after a negative verification of some files) the user could make a use of previous, correctly autosaved versions of selected files. Of course if a file was manually saved *after* its last autosave, the user should be informed about that.
@alfa333: fixing crashes is much more effective than changing a string (which won't be read) in a dialog... Thus it would have been more interesting to track thecrash (ie. send a crash report). To your first point: AFAIK, the recovering doesn't use (and I don't think it would be possible to do so) the autosaved file but temps files. To your second point: we can add a "Please verify if your document has been properly recovered". The sentence should be clearly mean "...be aware that some elements might not have been recovered" and NOT "report a defect if something is lost". Once again, the recovery just makes a guess, there is no 100% security in it! Small thing: the design of this warning could consist in a warning box with an exclamation icon. No red or big size font for it is inconsistent with the GUI and is not accessible. @mav: I hope you don't mind if I reassign directly to you as an enhancement.
Reassigned
@es: You mentioned crash reports. Do you mean automatic reports? I think I accepted sending the auto-report about this crash (see P.S.). Is there a way to make a use of it? Regarding "the recovering doesn't use (...) the autosaved file but temps files" - so what for are autosave's? May be I misuse the word "autosave" - I mean the operation for which I can define the frequency with the following path (provided I am translating names correctly from Polish to English): Tools>Options>Load/Save>General> section 2 (Save?), item 3 with "minutes" field. Regarding "we can add..." - yes please, do it. The current texts promise too much. To be precise, I am using a Polish version of OOo. The message after restoring documents, in the column Status, says (translated back to English) "Recovered correctly". Similarly, in some circumstances, immediately after the crash I can see a message "All documents will be saved", which also suggest that everything will certainly be good. If the above messages do not properly correspond to their originals, I can write to the authors of Polish translation of OOo package. If you (i.e. OOo Programers) would like to improve yet further the restoring dialog, I suggest to let the user decide for each document whether it should be restored or not. The user should be given the info about each document whether it was modified since its last (succesful) save, and possibly, what is the timestamp of the version saved in a normal way and what is the time corresponding to what might be restored. A box with exclamation would be good: this should make users read the message carefully - at least these users who used to listen when somebody is speaking to them. If OOo can distinguish whether the recovery is guaranteed or not, the message in the "guaranteed case" should not contain the exclamation mark. Thanks in advance Alfa333 P.S. I do not perfectly remember whether I accepted or cancelled the report, but I have (in my mail folders) an automatic report confirmation; the confirmation was dated March 25, 21:28, so comparing this with the timestamp of the corrupted file (March 25, 19:50) and with the timestamp of my first post in this thread, this seems the report was about *that* crash.
mav->fl: Could you please take a look. The Crash-Recovery dialog seems to need additional info, that states that the document should be checked by the user ( at least in case the document was stored during the crash ).