Automatically backup your LibreOffice Files

To setup LibreOffice to keep a backup copy of your working document, follow these steps:
1) Open the Tools menu and click on the “Options…” choice, at the bottom of the menu:

2) From the Options window, expand “Load/Save” and select “General”:

 

3) Check the box in front of “Always create backup copy” (circled above). Click the “OK” button to close this dialog box.
Once this is done, LibreOffice will save the previous version of your document every time you save a new one. If the current version gets corrupted for any reason, the previous version will generally be safe. You should probably change the AutoRecovery field to 3-5 minutes.
To locate the backup version of your file should you need to recover a file:

1) From the Linux system menu, select “Places” then “Home folder” to open your documents folder:

2) From the menu in this window, select “View” and then “Show Hidden Files” (or press CTRL-H) to display a number of files and folders normally hidden from view:

Your screen should now look something like this:

3) To navigate to the location where LibreOffice stores its backup versions, select the following folders in sequence: “.LibreOffice” (highlighted above), “3”, “user” and “backup”.

4) If you have already made the changes to the LibreOffice settings and have saved any documents, then there should be files in this folder. These files will have the same name as your documents, but will end with “.bak”. Copy the file to your desktop. Make sure you do not actually move the file or you risk losing your backup version. You can do this by holding down the “Ctrl” key on the keyboard while dragging the document to your desktop (or another location of your preference) or by right-clicking on the file and selecting copy, the right-clicking where you want to put it and selecting paste.

5) When the file is on your desktop, replace the “.bak” extension with “.doc” to allow LibreOffice to edit this file. It is also advisable to change the name of the document itself, not just the extension, to prevent anything from happening to your original backup. If you keep the same name, LibreOffice will overwrite the backup when you next save this document. While this should be okay, it is safer if you name it something else and preserve the original backup.

6) Once the extension (and the filename) has been changed, you can open the document in LibreOffice and continue working at the point of your previous save.
Last, for this to be most effective, you must save frequently!