Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 2734
StarImpress destroyed my file (3 times!!!)
Last modified: 2003-09-08 16:54:41 UTC
On two separate occasions (once in October, once in November, both time in either OpenOffice 638 or StarOffice 6.0beta) I was working on a complicated presentation document. When I did my final SAVE the file was just completely wiped off my hard drive, no traces left. Unbelievable. My platform: Intel Pentium + Red Hat Linux 7.2 (earlier: 7.1) + Ximian Gnome + OpenOffice 638 or StarOffice 6.0beta. Type of document: a presentation with approx 30 slides with a large background, no transitions, maybe 10 imported JPG files. What I did immediately prior to the catastrophic data loss: save file (File-Save). I believe in at least one of the two cases I did File-Save As ... Powerpoint presentation right before or about the time of the destruction of file (I save my files in .SXI format, then make a .PPT copy and export to HTML when I have a finished document). What happens: - I do File Save - I close the document - I go to the list of recently used documents in the File menu and pick up the document I just saved - I get a message saying "document does not exist" or something like that - I do a full search of my hard drive but cannot find (1) the document as I called, (2) a document of a similar size or (3) a document that was modified in the last few hours. So the document appears to have disappeared completely! Frequency of occurrence: This has happened to me with two completely different slide-shows (different template etc). On the second occasion, I had backed up an earlier version of the document and went back to that to reconstruct the file. But the same problem occured AGAIN. So I have lost a total of 3 different files based on two originals. During this period, I have worked on maybe 4 presentations - so this has happened on 2 out of 4 documents I have worked on. Source file: this file contains confidential information so I cannot attach it to this bug report. However, I am willing to e-mail it to the person trying to diagnose this problem, assuming my file will be treated confidentially. This is obviously a major problem. Please let me know if I can assist in trouble-shooting this problem. Bart Decrem
Perhaps this is related to bug 2736 I just filed?
Reassigned to Wolfram.
Would it be possible to strip of the confidential content and attach the file? Another possiblility is to send the file direct to my email-adress: Wolfram.Garten@sun.com I have rebuild a file from your description but I cannot reproduce the bug. Thanks for your help.
It would be impractical to strip out the confidential content (it's all confidential) so I have sent the file to your personal email account. I can't quite recall what the second crasher file was... Let me know if there's anything else I can do to assist. Best of luck.
I have received your bug doc but unfortunately I am not able to reproduce this behaviour. I have tested this on different linux configurations with the mentioned versions but everything worked well. Please let us know if this occurs in the future. Thanks for your help!
Issue closed.
Well, this is not something that happens all the times, or even once out of 10 times. But it HAS happened to me on three different occasions, with catastrophic dataloss, ie: the file just TOTALLY DISAPPEARS. So there's definitely some disastrous bug lurking somewhere deep in the bowels of StarImpress. I'm not sure how you would flush it out but it may be worth making some sort of automated script to generate, say, 100 fairly fancy starimpress files, do a bunch of manipulations in them, include a few OO crashes, then keep saving and wait until a file disappears. In any event, I'll ping you again next time my file gets eaten by OO.