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.
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.
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.)
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 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.
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.