This is about the most recent version of LibreOffice on Windows 10. I can’t speak for other versions.
My daughter worked hard on her social studies essay. I type things in for her because she’s a really bad typist, but she tells me what to write… but I didn’t remember to manually save her social studies essay yesterday, and for some reason the ThinkPad rebooted, LibreOffice crashed and we lost the whole thing… because autosave was not automatically on when I installed it.
No, recovery didn’t work. We just got a blank file.
I rewrote it for her based on the information we had and what I remembered and tried to make it sound like what a 13-year-old would write because it was basically my fault and she did do the work. I did have her sit with me as I wrote it in case she didn’t like something I wrote, but it was sort of cheating. I’m okay with that cheating since I know she worked hard on it.
First, though, I went into the settings and turned on autosave.
I like LibreOffice, but why the hell is that not on automatically? Honestly, I don’t really understand why someone wouldn’t want their documents autosaved, but I’m pretty sure most people would want that.
This isn’t fucking 1993. I shouldn’t have to remember to save a document anymore and it shouldn’t be lost forever because of it.
Like I said, I like LibreOffice. I don’t really want to trust documents to Microsoft or Google. But this was really annoying.
Us older folks automatically hit save every few minutes. But not saving days worth of work is asking for trouble.
I’m feeling old right now, thx
I even impulsively hit Ctrl+S when writing comments on Lemmy once in a while
You have to hit Ctrl+S 3 or 4 times in a row, just in case too.
This is how I play Pokemon yellow. Save game? Better save again just in case.
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.If only computers could automate repetitive tasks. Oh, well.
If only people understood the tradeoffs with automation
Auto save with Google Docs style snapshots has so little overhead I’d hardly consider it a trade-off. We have insane amounts of disk storage and extremely reliable non-volatile memory. The only reason against it that I can conceive of is confidential data you don’t ever want to exist outside of volatile memory.
All modern word processors use auto save and it kinda blows my mind libre does not do this.
They can. Just have to turn the autosave on. Better to manually save still just in case
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.
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.
Never assume something works until you’ve verified it. And even then assume it’ll break some time
I mean, yes, but also it’s a fair assumption to make that autosave would either be on or the fact that it was off would be communicated.
A fair assumption maybe, but not a safe one.
I think your memory might be failing on this, because we’re about the same age and autosave wasn’t really a common feature in the 90s. MacOS didn’t introduce autosave until OSX Lion in 2010, and Microsoft’s auto-recover (which was their only feature even close to autosave until office365) wasn’t introduced until the 2000s and didn’t work properly until 2007.
What word processors? Even Microsoft office doesn’t have autosave on by default unless you’re working off of One Drive/Share Point online.
Why would you switch to different software and assume it works the same as another?
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There are free 10 finger typing classes online. Frankly it’s a bit fun, similar to learning an instrument! I did one during downtime at work because I was a 6/7 finger typer, and always had to look for numbers or punctuation other than . , ! ?
Furthermore, if the laptop randomly reboots for no reason, autosave won’t save you. You just need a tiny bit of bad luck for the computer to crash while saving, corrupting the perfectly-good file saved to disk.
Hardly how file saving works. Else you could say the same about a bit of bad luck for the computer to crash while pressing ctrl-s, corrupting the perfectly-good file saved on disk.
Too many people on this thread seem to see autosave and ctrl-s as two different things, governed by magic and mystery, one of them indispensable to conside nyourself an experienced computer user. It’s the same fucking piece of code, in one case invoked by a timer, in the other one by the end user pressing a key combo.
Op’s issue was that automated was disabled by default. Obviously autosave doesn’t work it it’s disabled.
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Jesus never loses any data.
Because Jesus saves.
Lol. We came this far that forgetting to save is caused by shitty software…
While I can understand you wanting autosave on in your situation, I much prefer autosave off because I often open files to see what is in them and do not want to automatically modify them just because I accidentally hit a key and delete it. Automatically changing stuff is a choice you should have to make, not a feature that I have to race to disable.
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>, oh hell auto save is back on…
Just mark it as final then. This whole thread is infuriating. People working themselves into pretzels with their misguided reasons for not wanting auto-save when they really just don’t know to use the software.
OP is right. I use Office 365 and haven’t lost work on a document in over 10 years. Auto-save absolutely should be the default.
Or not trusting autosave because they lost a document once in the 80s when autosave didn’t exist, and now they tell everyone to compulsively press ctrl-s because software can be trusted enough to drive a car, but not save a file every minute or so. Bonus point when they introduce themselves as I’m a software developer…
Yeah so maybe when we trust software to drive cars, then we can talk about trusting autosave.
Side note : You say she’s a bad typist so you type it for her. But how exactly is she going to learn how to type then?
Maybe just let her do things poorly and learn
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.
With an essay, it would literally take hours.
Ignoring that this would get faster with the practise of typing it themselves:
How quickly are people writing essays these days? I’m a decently fast typer and it always took me a couple of hours to write a whole essay at that age. Once I was a few years older and was diligent in drafting a really good outline first I’d maybe get it to under a hour at the computer, but the speed of typing was never the bottleneck.
Again, it can take her a full minute to type a sentence. She is an incredibly slow typist. This is really the first big essay she’s ever had to write and I wanted her to think about what she wanted to say, not hunt and peck for ages.
Look, maybe you don’t have kids. Maybe your kids are good typists. My kid has just started down this road of writing real essays and I have decided that typing speed is far less important than critical thinking when it comes to her education. You are free to make your own parenting decisions, but I would appreciate you not questioning mine, especially when you are not able to see the full picture when you don’t actually know either me or my child.
Critical thinking is a high level skill. High level skills must be built on top of low level skills, and people learn thing better when they write themselves. The mechanics of putting the words to paper are an important part of the WRITING process.
While I won’t debate your decision, please be sure that 1. You recognize how rediculously important learning to type properly is for today’s kids, and 2. That she may not want to learn, and is slow because of it. She may need a reward system, and a defined set time to learn. Good luck, and I hope it goes well for you.
All it takes is a few minutes to give chatgpt a good prompt and the copy and casting to the text document. 🧐
Are you going to type her emails and reports when she goes to work some day?
No?
Only the long ones?
Do you think maybe it might be better, if she is going to write an essay at her age, for her to think about what she is going to say and put it in a comprehensible and logical way than slowly typing things out letter by letter so that each sentence takes over a minute and she can work on her typing skills in other ways which require less creative thought?
No. All the other kids in her class are typing their own essays. Why isn’t she?
Which other kids would those be? She’s in online school.
And, as I said to the other person, feel free to do what you want with your own kids, but I feel that when my child is writing one of the first essays she’s ever written, her ability to think about it critically is, in my opinion, far more important to her education than hunting and pecking on a keyboard for hours rather than think about it.
I think that if writing takes a lot of effort it naturally makes people think more about what they’re going to write.
That’s a very neurotypical way of looking at the world.
Autosave should always be seen as a back up option that covers unexpected closes or whatever. It shouldn’t really be a thing to rely on as the main option.
You never have to worry about a document saving if you make sure it’s actually saved by manually saving before closing.
No Backup no pity
No Save no pity
I guess it’s about what one’s used to. I’d be pretty annoyed if it started overwriting my documents when I when I do not explicitly tell it to do that.
I copy something from the document, maybe hit cut instead of copy. Now it’s gone from the original.
I’m not sure what you mean by overwriting. With something like Office365 or Google Docs, it saves each time you type or delete a character. I don’t see any reason why that couldn’t be the same with FOSS software.
Overwrinting as saving the (unwanted) changes over the file.
I know the workflow on these collaborative online tools is like that. I also don’t see a reason why an offline tool can’t be like that, but I think turning it on by default would cause more bad surprises for people who don’t expect it to do things unannounced and without asking.
I guess this is something the program could ask on initial startup and make the editor UI very clear on what the state is.
3 take aways from this that I hope you’ll get:
- Learn to save often. Sometimes that means 5x in a row just to be sure.
- Never just assume the software is going to save you from yourself. Its OK to trust software, but you gotta make sure it does what you expect it to do. In this case, that means either checking those settings when you start out, or making sure the file exists on disk.
- Invest in some typing games for your kid so they learn how to type properly and can do their own work! I understand wanting to help your kid succeed, but you can’t do that in the long term without crippling their development.
Everyone learns compulsive ctrl-s eventually.
I was going to say we’ve all lost an essay before we learned to routinely save the document. :)
Unless she is has some sort of disability, you typing for her just seems like enablement.
But she’s bad at it, see
Even if its on by default, first thing you should do when installing or first using it is adjust the settings imo. How often is still a matter of personal choice. And other settings are as well. Granted, I get I’m probably far from the average given how much I like to tinker with settings and customizing toolbars, etc. Still agree it should be on by default along with some basic version history to undo unwanted autosaves.
So in unrelated news I had to replace a keycap because… yeah.
Learning how to properly save and backup is the more important lesson anyway.
