Re: spreadsheet file is missing changes

[David Stanaway <david stanaway net>]

On Fri, 2006-02-24 at 14:57 -0800, Ken Hill wrote:
> I closed the screen of the laptop and I went to bed. The battery ran
> out of juice, thus, the drive was probably not properly unmounted.
> However, I saved the file before closing the screen of the laptop;
> wouldn't that of saved the file even if the drive unmounted
> improperly?

Ouch. If you saved the file, and very shortly after closed the screen,
then their could be a chance that the filesystem writes were still
cached in RAM. The only way to be fairly certain that the file is fully
stored on disk before something that might prematurely halt the system
is to use a journaling filesystem (ext3, xfs, reiserfs, jfs) and run the
sync command before leaving the system.

I would have thought that the powermanager stuff would do a 'sync'
before putting the system in standby, maybe I am mistaken, if that did
happen, maybe the filesystem is not a journaling filesystem, and there
was some fs corruption when the system was shut down, and the file got
disconnected with the fs-check. Maybe take a peak at the filesystem root
for where you saved the file, and look for a directory called 
"lost+found" and see if it contains any files.  If there are a few,
maybe in that directory try:
file *

and see if there are an files identified as "gzip compressed data"