why openoffice writer file corrupt and cannot be opened?

[Applet]

please see attachment, the file is ~1230 pages long. All text. I had my mac on its last couple of GB's of its 250GB. ~2GB available and (14 MB purgeable). The problem arose when I tried to open the file. so shut down the computer. But on trying to reopen it, the problem persisted. Is there anyway of getting back the file?

 

[chscag]

You can try repairing the file, however, the problem is that you let your Mac run dangerously low on space. You might want to make a backup of that file and anything else on the drive before attempting repair. It may be possible to remove some things on that drive allowing more space for Open Office to repair the file. Copy what you can to an external hard drive.

 

[Applet]

You can try repairing the file, however, the problem is that you let your Mac run dangerously low on space. You might want to make a backup of that file and anything else on the drive before attempting repair. It may be possible to remove some things on that drive allowing more space for Open Office to repair the file. Copy what you can to an external hard drive.

What are the typical things that can happen to you files if you let it run dangerously low on space? best thing is not to let it run below 5% of capacity? so l have a 250GB HD, so =>12.5GB should be ok right? right now HD has 16.5GB available with 1.34GB (purgeable), and no repair attempt works, it just gives me a blank openoffice writer , what does the 1.34GB purgeable mean? so when low in capacity don't open files incase they become corrupt right?
it's esp strange because the corrupt file is only 1.6MB, whereas an older (and smaller) copy is 4MB. maybe it was =>4MB before becoming corrupt?

 

[MacInWin]

Assuming it's a spinner drive and not SSD, you should leave 10-15% free. The operating system uses space for caching, plus the apps, when they open documents, create temporary scratch space where your edited document is stored so that if you decide to abandon the edits, the original is still there. So opening a 4 MB document could take up to 12 MB or more of the drive. The same applies to just about all apps which allow editing of files.

For the specific document, if repair gives a blank document, then the most like issue is that the metadata about the document is damaged, in which case it's pretty much toast. But you might try a different version of Open Office to see if it's accessible at all. Finally, you can try textedit to see if it will open the document. You may be able to save at least the text, if not the formatting.

 

[Applet]

Assuming it's a spinner drive and not SSD, you should leave 10-15% free. The operating system uses space for caching, plus the apps, when they open documents, create temporary scratch space where your edited document is stored so that if you decide to abandon the edits, the original is still there. So opening a 4 MB document could take up to 12 MB or more of the drive. The same applies to just about all apps which allow editing of files.

For the specific document, if repair gives a blank document, then the most like issue is that the metadata about the document is damaged, in which case it's pretty much toast. But you might try a different version of Open Office to see if it's accessible at all. Finally, you can try textedit to see if it will open the document. You may be able to save at least the text, if not the formatting.

it is SSD, 250GB, does that mean its ok to have it running real low on available space? in future don't try to open if only have 14MB (purgeable)?
l tried to open with text edit, and it really does seem like its toast, check attachment. still dont understand why it has gone down to 1.6MB in size from ~4MB. it is all text.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

TextEdit will NOT open OpenOffice files. It will only open TXT and RTF files. You HAVE to use OpenOffice to open ODT files, so don't trust what TextEdit says.

Without enough free space, you risk many issues like not being able to save files, have swap space and so on. So generally keep at least 20% of your drive free. For documents and other things, just get an external drive and use that to hold the data.

 

[MacInWin]

For an SSD you can tighten up that 20% just a bit, maybe to 15%, since fragmentation is not as critical to performance on SSD drives. But you still need the scratch and swap space, so more free is better.

And Text Edit does open .odt documents for me. Use Finder to find the file, then right click, open with and select Text Edit. Worked for me just fine to do that with two I just tested.