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.

  • dylanTheDeveloper@lemmy.worldEnglish
    611·
    10 months ago

    Never trust autosave. Everything from notepad to Visual Studio gets the Ctrl+S treatment when something is updated.

    • SkippingRelax@lemmy.worldEnglish
      410·
      10 months ago

      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

      • gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        192·
        10 months ago

        Autosave has intervals, shit can happen between those intervals

        I’ve lost good work to a program crash / power outage / other sudden loss of work enough times to know that trusting autosave when it’s there is a fools move

        • SkippingRelax@lemmy.worldEnglish
          24·
          10 months ago

          Fair enough obviously a real issue considering that it is not just you but many other in this thread, that are posting the same or upvoting I do wonder what software, or and electricity grid you are all on and if you are typing from a war zone though. It has happened to me too, mind you. Once. It was some sort of word processor, in the 1990s before autosave. Been spending my days on a computer since then for work and hobbies, can’t say I remember a single other occurrence after that.

          • gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            2·
            10 months ago

            I do wonder what software, or and electricity grid you are all on and if you are typing from a war zone thoug

            Bruh what? I live in California, wild to jump to questioning if we’re in a war zone. The issue is more often crashing software than it is power problems, as well.

            Losing power goes beyond the grid though, you can have a power supply fail, animal turn off a power strip your PC is plugged into, a lightning strike can cause momentary grid interruption, a car can knock down a pole and take out local power for a few hours, an idiotic roommate can accidentally hit your PC and cause it to freeze, an animal can knock into your power button or switch and shut your PC down, you can accidentally hit your PSU power flip and accidentally shut it off, and more

            All of these ive had happen to me. Not always while I was working on something, but many while I was. Auto recovery doesn’t always work for these kinds of things so it is ALWAYS a good idea to save