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.
I do support challenging the software design before blaming the user, but I feel like I’m being thrown through a bit of a loop here. Autosave, while not unusual, is still the minority behaviour - surely?
I’m checking through tools I have installed and can’t find much that autosaves - even Word (tested editing a local file) doesn’t seem to autosave as far as I can tell. And, to be fair to the software, I often don’t want to overwrite the disk copy automatically (though there are some “best of both worlds” approaches, like with VSCode).
I would have sworn that autosave was enabled by default in absolutely every software that has anything to save since like the 2000s, you’re throwing me on a loop here.
As far as text editors actually, i feel like they may be constantly saving, particularly if they’re cloud-based. But i’ve been using LibreOffice for a while so i wouldn’t know. (and yes i did have to enable autosave)
Possible that we’re thinking about different features? Like for Microsoft Word, if I save a file to disk, make an edit, then exit out without saving (hitting “cancel” when it asks if I want to save) the disk copy is left untouched. That’s how the most tools work as far as I’m aware. It does have crash recovery (which may or may not work better than LibreOffice’s crash recovery, no idea).
Some editing software will use a copy of your file as extended memory, so it is always caching to disk. That can be slow, so some don’t do it for small files. I am thinking of Linux tools like vi and vim.