Re: recovering from gnumeric crash using .gsf-save-* file

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Fri, Jul 14, 2006 at 07:12:28AM -0400, Morten Welinder wrote:
> > unfortunately, this doesn't work: gunzip says "not in gzip format".  the
> > size of the file is within less than 0.1 percent of the original .xls
> > file, which leads me to think that it's in that format (or close to it).
> > but neither gnumeric nor ooffice can read it (unsupported format,
> > general i/o error, etc.).
> >
> > what is the .gsf-save-?????? format, anyway?
>
> Oh, you were saving as .xls.  I thought you saved as .gnumeric.
> The .gsf-* files are just temporary files that become the final saved
> files on success, so yours would be in (truncated) .xls format.

Depending on when the export failed the file may be unrecoverable.
xls uses the OLE2 container format (like a tar file) to hold it's
content.  When libgsf writes OLE2 it stores all the user's content
then goes back at the end and stores the layout.  If the crash
happened before the layout was saved gnumeric will not know the
layout of the data.