Recover from an Office Disaster

A method of DOCX Rescue

Posted by Joe Blankenship on June 22, 2017

When you spend months working on a paper or literary project, the last thing you want is for your files to become corrupt or to somehow completely lose your data! I recently had a nerve-racking experience I thought I would share as the solution was not immediately apparent to me.

My setup is completely open-source. I was using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with LibreOffice 5.3 in the process of modifying a Microsoft-formatted DOCX file. A week before this incident, I started to notice that saving the file was taking much longer than usual. The night before the file corruption, this noticeable time was doubled if not more so. I had been backing-up my files, but it was on a version-to-version basis and was not a persistent back-up (persistent back-ups being something which I HIGHLY recommend). This night, I had completed a great deal of the required revisions and was set to review this document the following day.

However, the following morning I sat in a cafe facing the below message on my screen.

Fig. 36 LibreOffice Error Message

I immediately went into crisis mode. Restarting the software and computer did not help and though I could open my backup, it did not have any of the previous night’s revisions I needed. After a few deep breaths, I went to the FAQs and Stack Overflow for some sort of solution.

I came across an article stating that if the automatic recovery for LibreOffice fails, a corrupted DOCX file (as a formatted Office Open XML file structure) can be saved as a ZIP file and then opened using an archive manager (this software will vary between operating systems, but the process will be the same). In Ubuntu 16.04, I am able to mount the ZIP file using Archive Mounter which opens it as another drive in your file browser.

Fig. 37 Opening the ZIP file

From here, we are going to look for a file named document.xml in the word directory. If you open it in the browser, you will see your document formatted in XML.

Fig. 38 Raw XML from DOCX

Even though it appeared that I successfully saved my document the night before, there was a good amount of work missing from this XML document. However, I only had to redo about a weeks worth of work (it should be said that it was not a simple feat).

Much of the document was reconstructed manually which led to some issues in the review process, but there are options to parse the XML into a new document. Using Python libraries zipfile and lxml, you can automate the above process with formatting into a new DOCX file (or file format of your choice).

Hopefully, this makes the recovery process for a seemingly catastrophic event easier to begin.