My daughter lost her social studies essay because LibreOffice doesn't have autosave on automatically.

I'm feeling old right now, thx

I even impulsively hit Ctrl+S when writing comments on Lemmy once in a while

I was going to say, it was absolutely drilled into our heads to save after every paragraph.
My high school teacher would occasionally flip the breaker for the computers in the school computer lab just to give those of us with bad saving habits a hard reminder.

Young folk who have lost hours of progress in robotics programming projects too... Once is enough to learn your lesson. The inevitable second time is traumatizing. By the third time, you hit Ctrl+s five times after every paragraph.

If only computers could automate repetitive tasks. Oh, well.

I still do this regularly while using Google docs even though I don’t think it has any effect.

I'm 28, do that too. Though maybe that's what you meant by older.

And “save as” every few times (or every time if the document is important).

I lost a lot of work hours once because I was using a program that saved a backup copy every time you saved (so that you'd always be able to recover the previous version), and the damn thing crashed while saving, thus corrupting both the save file and the backup. Never. Again. Hard drive space is less expensive than my time and what's left of my mental health.

I am an older folk. I grew up with an Apple II. I just have gotten used to autosave being on automatically in pretty much every word processor I've used since probably the mid-1990s. I just can't imagine why they decided to not have it on when you install it.

I'm barely an adult and I do this. I think it's less your age, and more the type of programs you tend to use—ei. programs where you may not want things auto saved, for me game engine, but there's plenty of examples.

Few minutes? For me its every few seconds

"Us" don't do anything, but we do.

I was going to say we've all lost an essay before we learned to routinely save the document. :)

Yep. Unfortunate though this is, it's an important lesson for OP and their kiddo.

Save early and save often.

Maybe just advise her to learn piano. Does wonders to one's typing habits.

As I told someone else, I let her do it when it isn't a long essay. With an essay, it would literally take hours.

I work with 365 and have to create docs from yesterday's version (or last weeks etc) all the time. Auto save can be a real pain in the arse.

Turn it off, save as

<yyyy-mm-dd-DocName>

Exactly. I don't want my computer doing things without me telling it to. If I want it to save the file I will tell it to save the file. If I don't tell it to save the file, I most definitely don't want it to save it behind my back. Auto save is an anti-pattern, especially if it overwrites your manual save files.

(Saving an independent recovery file, preferably including undo and redo history, might come in handy in case of crashes, sure, but it should be optional and never on by default, out of privacy concerns; other users might use the computer, and it's safer to assume that the previous user might not want others to see the documents they had open last time.)

Yes. Like many here, I’ve learned to hit save A LOT. But I also want to decide when the time is right. Whether I’m writing a paper, coding, photo retouching, whatever, I flail around and experiment while working. I want to lock in my changes when I’m happy with the progress. If something goes awry I’d rather resume at the last manual save than some other weird thing I did afterwards.

What freaks me out is when I open a file, make no changes, go to close it, and I get “Do you want to save the changes you made?”

I use Office 365 for work and I still CTRL+S. Something learned the hard way is hard to let go of lol

Bound quicksave to the M4 button, same as F5/refresh. I'll just spam it at all times, in all apps and games.

quicksave

Is that because of bugs, or shitty software that you don't trust autosave? Isn't it likely that ctrl-s is affected by the same problem and regardless of how compulsively you press the combo, it does in fact nothing?

Note that OPs instance simply had autosave disabled, not really a trust issue

UXD would state that this is a software design issue, and not user error. The software should be designed with crashes and "lost" user data in mind.

To be fair, you could just delete the faulty part or click on Undo, and just save again.

Auto-save can usually create a new save with a timestamp, every time it saves. It´s called incremental auto-saves.

This is an insane scenario: my software design decision is, despite recovery mechanisms like previous versions, file history, and undo mechanisms, I'm afraid if a cat uses a keyboard I'll accidentally save changes I don't want to a word document.

Lol. The only user error was choosing libre office instead of a user friendly software stack that has reasonable defaults and r recovery mechanisms.

It sucks to lose work, but this is clearly a user error.

Didn't wanna say it but yeah, 100%.

Also I was kinda suspicious of the simultaneous claim that the PC randomly restarted and LO crashed. And there's no recovery file. But that's probably just me. For all the faults Windows has, failing to catch programs with unsaved work when restarting isn't one of them I've ever experienced.

I don't have a cat and we did this out at a cafe, so yes, I would still be an advocate for it. I think that most people do not have that issue even if they have a cat.

That's why I lock my machine before walking away. That's

<windows key>

But she’s bad at it, see

Man the best for learning to type was AIM in the long before times. Without that program I'd still be chicken pecking.

What do you mean "tell me you graduateed high school in 2000 with out telling me"?

Man, maybe I just grew up in a different time and/or environment but I still to this day manually save obsessively. I use VSCode most days and feel like I'm constantly hitting the save hotkey. With that said though, I am just not a fan of most autosaves. I like to know what the current contents are and whether or not I have unsaved changes.

That's just me though.

Thank you! My God, the amount of holier-than-thou "it's your own fault" in this thread is mildly infuriating in and of itself. Auto save and versioning have been a thing in Word for at least 8 years, probably over a decade but that's the first version mentioned in their docs, and I struggle to think much software I use regularly that doesn't have some form of it. Hell, even the new Notepad on Windows keeps your changes when it's accidentally closed.

I like most open source software but this sort of attitude in the community and what seems like an absolute disdain for any UX concept from the past 20 years makes me very hesitant to recommend it almost anyone outside very specific technical circles.

What you have here is another case of Linux users jumping to defend the only things they have to defend, even if it’s absolute shit.

Funny how OP is using libreoffice on Windows though, what's there Linux-related to defend? Did a Linux user hurt you? If anything this is another opportunity for some snarky comment about Windows being shit and crashing for no reason since the 1990s.

Thank you.

“The year is 2024. Any car that doesn’t automatically brake when it encounters an obstacle is a shit car”

While the above may be true, it’s definitely not a reason to say:

“I shouldn’t have to use my brakes”

Auto save exists because everyone forgot to save sometimes.

But there are other situations that manually saving wouldn't be solved and auto saving does.

Like it's easier to lose data if something happens before you manually save it. With auto saving that's more difficult as it is auto saving every x time or x changes. Yeah you could do that manually... every x minutes/work but it's something that clearly should be automated.

The main issue here was assuming something has a feature and that it has it enabled without checking if it does.

You're absolutely right. I got used to the convenience and got out of the habit of it.

Seriously, it's 2024. Everyone has to use technology now, so the software should reflect that. UX is probably one of the big barriers to widespread FOSS adoption.

No worries LibreOffice has ancestry going back to CP/M (via StarOffice) so it's on the DOS side of things: Of course it's the fault of the software, it's not a Unix native program.

How? How is this terrible? Why should autosave be expected? I absolutely do not like autosave. No thanks. It is an unusual behaviour, why would anyone expect it to do this?

That said, it is really weird that it didn't recover. I have never hard Libre office not recover from a computer outage or even a forced shutdown. That is unexpected.

Lol she didn't do anything. It was the op doing his daughter's work for her that didn't save it.

That's the most troubling part of this story, that the op doesn't insist their child learn how to type. I'm wondering how much of their other work they do for her.

Libre office is open source, btw. If it's so poorly designed op can go and fix it.

People have said "I lost everything because of Microsoft Word." "I lost everything because of Wordpad." "I lost everything because of Notepad." You guys probably blame schools for not teaching your kids how to laundry, taxes, or change a tire.

Also, apparently crashes might reset the auto save tick depending on the version used, so check twice if it happens again just to make sure.

Oh just fucking great. Thanks for telling me that. I think I might just try a different office suite.

First of all, as a time honored tradition it is customary to say this: Never, ever trust an autosave.

I've worked in IT and software development for 25 years, and this is literally the first time I hear someone say this, never mind call it a 'tradition' to say it.

I've got ctrl+s hard-coded into me early on. Every paragraph I'll save.

I do miss hitting save and looking over at the floppy light to make sure it's updating haha.

Type type save... :looks over for spin click click blinky: ... good...

Its a constant urge building up for me. The longer i do something without saving, the bigger the urge becomes to save. The urge was grown from moments of despair of having lost hours and hours of work hehe

I started on the windows 95/XP, but still hit Ctrl+s after every few sentences. It's just part of typing to me. It confuses google docs when I try to save out of habit.

Yeah, same here - except it was on a PC jr. I hit save so often that one program actually balks at me now and then. (It's just a fussy program, most don't care and do the save.)

Same 80s experience. The idea that someone would argue or even think that software should still behave as it did back then is mind-blowing. None of the resource constraints of that era are even remotely relevant today, but we are still dysfunctional meat. There is no good reason for a word processor to not automatically save work by default - and unless someone is working with a lot of large images, even persistence of the full undo stack is not a tall order.

Yes. If anything, if I were an english teacher, at some point I’d have my kids turning in the same essay four or five times, just to show them how good things can get when they remake them again and again.

and make sure you press Ctrl+S at least five times every time you want to save. I swear it sometimes doesn't work the first time.

You can set VSCode to autosave pretty much every keystroke. you should be able to do that for all office apps too IMO

Not really, autosave has been a thing for so many years at this point

/s

I agree and disagree at the same time.
I agree, people should learn how to use technology.
I disagree, technology should be easy to use.

Do you mean OneDrive? There is an auto-recovery option Word separately from OneDrive that saves a copy every X number of minutes.