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.

  • Subverb@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Having cut my teeth on MS-DOS 3.0 in a 4.77MHz PC with a monochrome monitor, two floppy drives and no hard disk, it was drilled into me early to save, save, save. It’s just muscle memory for me now.

    Writing a whole paper without saving is unimaginable to me.

    • DacoTaco@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      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

      • hardcoreufo@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Oh see I like to feel the rush of adrenaline from living dangerously and only save once completed.

    • helpImTrappedOnline@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      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.

    • limelight79@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      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.)

    • emptiestplace@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      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.