Hello Michael, thanks for your reply. Please use fsync, even if it may cause some frozen GUI for a few milliseconds, keeping your data safe should be priority to *everything else*. And if only older Linux-systems are caught, even more so. (And I say that as a debian-Lenny user. Older installations are not upgraded to the latest LibreOffice versions that often anyway - and to be honest I was only interested in SVG, otherwise I would still be happily using OpenOffice 2.4) While I was somewhat "lucky" to lose only a few hours work (if the other file were lost, it would have been a week though...) other people on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/817326 reported many days and weeks worth of lost data. I don't think that a faster GUI can make up for that, even if you add it up over a user's lifetime.
In fact it would be a good idea to keep a backup copy somewhere (for example in ~/.libreoffice/3/user/backup) for all recently used documents. If you keep several versions, that would be a great feature because it would mitigate user-mistakes (most deletions are caused by user-mistakes). I am a software developer myself and while it may be technically true that OpenOffice 2.4 also contains this bug (it's a *BUG*, not an enhancement proposal), it does not seem to appear as often. Maybe it's the combination with my NFS-setup (which has sometimes a delay of a few seconds because it has to spin up) or whatever, but 2.4 didn't do that for years, while 3.5 did it within a week after installation. In any case it's unacceptable. So please use fsync. Most Linux-installation which will install LibreOffice >3.5 will be using ext4 anyway. (But as I said, even I as an ext3 user would prefer a frozen GUI to dataloss any day of the week.) -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to libreoffice in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/817326 Title: [Upstream] Previously-saved LibreOffice document lost by power outage (became 0 bytes long) - LibreOffice should call fsync Status in LibreOffice Productivity Suite: Fix Released Status in “libreoffice” package in Ubuntu: Triaged Bug description: I was working on a document in LibreOffice today while my battery was low and so I was frequently saving, which I thought would help me if I lost power. However, when I eventually did lose power and later rebooted, the document had become 0 bytes long. LibreOffice was not able to restore the auto-saved copy either. As a result, I have lost a whole week of notes for one of my courses. After researching online, it seems that this is caused by the application not calling fsync() (or fdatasync()) when saving files. Due to delayed allocation in modern filesystems, there is no guarantee that the new file's data has actually been written to disk unless the application calls fsync. So if an app writes a new file and replaces the old one with it without fsync'ing the new one first then there is a window of opportunity during which a power failure will result in the loss of BOTH versions of the file. In ext4 this window is also much larger than in ext3. Theodore Tso blogged about this at http://ldn.linuxfoundation.org /blog-entry/delayed-allocation-and-zero-length-file-problem and http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news- media/blogs/browse/2009/03/don%E2%80%99t-fear-fsync. He strongly recommends to call fsync in this situation. Please update LibreOffice to fsync() saved files so that other users do not lose their data like I did. ProblemType: Bug DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04 Package: libreoffice-core 1:3.3.2-1ubuntu5 ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.42-generic 2.6.38.2 Uname: Linux 2.6.38-8-generic x86_64 Architecture: amd64 Date: Wed Jul 27 21:37:02 2011 InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release amd64 (20100429) ProcEnviron: LANGUAGE=en_US:en LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SHELL=/bin/bash SourcePackage: libreoffice UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to natty on 2011-04-29 (89 days ago) To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/df-libreoffice/+bug/817326/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
