Hi,

I use Libre Office Writer in Elementary on a Slimbook Curve.

At the end of the session I copy and paste the file I have been working on from my home onto two USB drives permanently left in place, so three copies in all.

Today I could not find any copy of the file I need, not in my home directory nor in either of the drives. I have not deleted the file and there is no sign of it in the trash anyway. All other files are still present.

The only recent oddity has been a couple of crashes believed to have been caused by a dodgy plug on the power adapter.

Any suggestions?

You sure that the data is not on the usb drives? And simple needs to be refreshed in a file manager?
What device nodes are the usb drives?

Look for them:
How were they being mounted before?

You could mount them manually somewhere and look at the contents.

Example:
Then take a look and see whats there. Use your own device nodes. You are sitting at the box, you'll need to find what each drives node is.

You could also pull them out, then issue
And plug one back in, and see what node it is. Understandable if data on the hard drive was gone somehow. Strange if data on a external device was gone. Unless you did not put it there to start with.

Edit:
Oh, and you did not say what file system the externals have on them. Or if your distro has ntfs3 in it. if not, and the dives are ntfs, you may need to mount with ntfs-3g.

Thanks for replying.

The files were there. My back-up policy is to close Office, open the file manager, copy the file, open a USB key, and paste the file straight into the directory. This always brings up warning about there being a file of that name and do I wish to overwrite it? I note the variation in file size and click Yes. Without re-copying the original file I repeat this with the other USB key. I do this with all my files. All of them are still there except the one called Claire2.ODT

In the trash I found a very old draft of Claire2, and its forbear Claire.ODT. I guess I last worked on Claire2 sometime last week, since when I've done other stuff so if it is there it may have been overwritten.

What I can't understand why all three copies shoud vanish though, since I haven't deleted anything and no other backed-up files are missing. It's making me think my back-up routine is unsafe.

I've little experience with Linux consoles beyond the md/cd/ls/man level, as I mostly just use my computer to write in the literary sense and Elementary is graphical.

I unmounted the USB keys yesterday and removed them. The one I put back today reports format MSDOS in file manager.

Phew!

Found 'em.

I installed TestDisk. Ran it on the two USB keys. Couldn't find anything. Despaired that I had overwritten the fie was about to give up when I noticed a file called Image.ODT. Never having used that name on a file I opened it to find it to be my missing file, Claire2.ODT. Examined all three directories and found same file in them.

Puzzled now. My working file was/is called Claire2.ODT and lives in a directory in my Home directory. It is backed-up by copy and "paste into folder" in identically named directories on 2 USB keys. How do all three copies come to be labelled Image.ODT when I have never used that name and no trace of the files can be found under their original name?

Anyway, thank you for taking the time to help me.

John.