KWord Documents (in mandrake) any chance of a backup?

[jer]

I just lost a significantly sized document because of KWord, I was about to back it up and email it out for safe keeping (was about halfway done) when KWord crashed.. is there any chance there's a .tmp file or anything that I can restore the lost work?

Otherwise.. can anyone recommend to me a better Word processor for KDE?

[jer]

Anyone?

[irlandes]

Originally posted by jer:
<STRONG>Anyone?</STRONG>

Kword (part of Koffice) is not yet, as far as I know, a stable project, though they are allegedly getting close. I have been in touch with a young man named Chris, who works on the Koffice project when not in class. I didn't like the absence of international characters, and something else which I forget, and he said it's already being worked on. I don't remember if it is going to have autobackup or not, but I think I read that it will.

LyX is interesting. It may be too much for you, depending on your need. It's actually a front end for LaTeX, a type setter program, though it does let you do a lot of weird stuff, including layouts for an entire book; or articles and books for the American Math Society; a formal letter; etc. And, if LyX doesn't do all you want, it lets the pros (math professors like my son often use LaTeX for their publishing) use embedded LaTeX commands. I think LyX is the one which states it does an automatic backup DURING a crash. In Drake 8.0, it comes with a nice tutorial, as well as extensive reference manuals. KLyX is supposed to be similar to LyX, but it really didn't work for me at all.

Drake 8.0 includes some sort of Abisuite, but I haven't used it yet.

But, for most of us, though it is bloated (245MB) and at times slow, (like 30 seconds after you click on it before it shows signs of life) Star Office 5.2 is a complete Office Suite. It can be bought; downloaded free; or comes with later Mandrake official packages. I made a text file 2,825 pages long, with all the files in all the packages in CD#1 of Drake 8.0, and it loaded it in 50 seconds on my old 233MHZ laptop -- kword chokes after an hour or so trying to load 1,000 pages.

I am guessing if you looked in the directory assigned to kword and there was no ~ file, it was toast.

[Craig McPherson]

If the file was never written to disk, and KWord doesn't have automatic backup features (I don't know if it does or not), then you're probably out of luck. I'd check the KWord documentation to see if it does have any backup features. There may be other ways to recover it, but they'd all take longer than doing it over from scratch.

If a file HAS been written to disk and you delete it, you can usually get it back undamaged with the "recover" program. That's only for ext2 filesystems, though. I use ReiserFS a lot, and I haven't looked to see if it has an undelete program yet.