Fix corrupted ods file

If you have been working with spreadsheet, then one day, when you open up the file, for some unknown reason, it show gibberish text. You will like OH MY GAWD!! where is my file!!?? well afraid not, today, we will try to recover the file. To be exact, the spreadsheet is ods format from open office. You can find more information here.

So, a good normal working ods file start with PK. See example below.

 $ hexdump -C myfile.ods | head -1  
 00000000 50 4b 03 04 14 00 00 08 00 00 b7 71 c5 46 85 6c |PK.........q.F.l|  

The broken one does not start with PK and for my spreadsheet, it is something like the following. It may be different than you but that does not matter.

 $ hexdump -C myfile.ods | head -1  
 00000000 2c 75 73 65 72 2c 55 73 65 72 57 6f 72 6b 73 |,user,UserWorks|  

because openoffice file is compressed file, and then you can fix using the application zip. To fix it, you can run the command such as the one below.

 user@localhost:~$ zip --fixfix myfile.ods --out myfixfile.ods   
 Fix archive (-FF) - salvage what can  
  Found end record (EOCDR) - says expect single disk archive  
 Scanning for entries...  
  copying: Object 1/styles.xml (398 bytes)  
  copying: Object 1/content.xml (1892 bytes)  
  copying: Object 1/meta.xml (281 bytes)  
  copying: Object 2/content.xml (1999 bytes)  
  copying: Object 2/meta.xml (281 bytes)  
  copying: Object 2/styles.xml (483 bytes)  
  copying: Object 3/content.xml (2116 bytes)  
  copying: Object 3/meta.xml (281 bytes)  
  copying: Object 3/styles.xml (398 bytes)  
  copying: styles.xml (1999 bytes)  
  copying: Object 4/meta.xml (281 bytes)  
  copying: Object 4/content.xml (2405 bytes)  
  copying: Object 4/styles.xml (398 bytes)  
  copying: content.xml (17364 bytes)  
  copying: meta.xml (441 bytes)  
  copying: ObjectReplacements/Object 1 (2278 bytes)  
  copying: ObjectReplacements/Object 2 (3654 bytes)  
  copying: ObjectReplacements/Object 3 (1924 bytes)  
  copying: ObjectReplacements/Object 4 (2483 bytes)  
  copying: META-INF/manifest.xml (449 bytes)  
 Central Directory found...  
 no local entry: mimetype  
 no local entry: settings.xml  
 no local entry: manifest.rdf  
 no local entry: Configurations2/menubar/  
 no local entry: Configurations2/toolpanel/  
 no local entry: Configurations2/progressbar/  
 no local entry: Configurations2/accelerator/current.xml  
 no local entry: Configurations2/statusbar/  
 no local entry: Configurations2/images/Bitmaps/  
 no local entry: Configurations2/toolbar/  
 no local entry: Configurations2/floater/  
 no local entry: Configurations2/popupmenu/  
 no local entry: Thumbnails/thumbnail.png  
 EOCDR found ( 1 73809)...  

So the above command will try to salvage whatever it can. You might have guess it, the fix version file is the one specified by --out parameter.

This method works superb for my corrupted file. The fix version of the file contain all the data as before and I was happy. :) I hope it works for you too. That's it for today learning. Good luck to you!