Cairo's been writing fanfiction lately, originally using openoffice .. and most of the time it works fine, but every now and then when she saves and exits she ends up with a zero-byte file. There's plenty of free disk space and I don't see anything in /var/log/messages indicating filesystem trouble, so I tried updating openoffice .. and a while later it happened again. The next time I switched to libreoffice, and set it to always make a backup. Today she's had the same problem again and lost about 40 pages of writing. There's still plenty of free disk space, nothing in /var/log/messages to indicate a filesystem problem, and NO backup. All I know is she's not accidentally highlighting and deleting everything because what gets saved is 0 bytes, NOT an empty document...

I've already suggested (after the first time) that she needs to keep regular backups on google docs, or just write everything directly in google docs, but openoffice/libreoffice should NOT be this unreliable and I've never heard of anyone else having similar problems.. Any idea what might be going on here?

other technical details; it's a fairly default and up to date install of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with a default filesystem (I think that's ext4)�