My daughter lost her social studies essay because LibreOffice doesn't have autosave on automatically.

Flying Squid@lemmy.world to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 297 points –

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.

443

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

On the other hand.. consider if your cat had walked over the keyboard before it rebooted and replaced it all with hhhhgggggggggggggggggggghgf before it auto saved and replaced the document. Would you still be an advocate for auto save?

It sucks to lose work, but this is clearly a user error.

UXD would state that this is a software design issue, and not user error. The software should be designed with crashes and "lost" user data in mind.

That is true. I could've sworn LibreOffice had a recovery mechanism similar to MS Office after a crash.

Even LibreOffice can only recover what has been saved. And if autosave is off, there might be less to recover than desirable. Again, that's a UXD problem.

To be fair, you could just delete the faulty part or click on Undo, and just save again.

This is an insane scenario: my software design decision is, despite recovery mechanisms like previous versions, file history, and undo mechanisms, I'm afraid if a cat uses a keyboard I'll accidentally save changes I don't want to a word document.

Lol. The only user error was choosing libre office instead of a user friendly software stack that has reasonable defaults and r recovery mechanisms.

Yup. The fear is input that wasn’t intended to be saved, being saved.

Your inability to comprehend the scenario doesn’t erase it.

You realise if it's saved you can now use features that are built into the software, that get saved, like using 'track changes' to accept or discard edits granually. You have file system level version control to choose previous versions, you have an undo feature built in. Three different tools to use.

Libre office is fine. You have no need to bash it. And it does have recovery files, this example is.... odd.

I don't have a cat and we did this out at a cafe, so yes, I would still be an advocate for it. I think that most people do not have that issue even if they have a cat.

Can confirm, have a cat and don't have that issue. Because I lock the screen when leaving the machine unattended.

Auto-save can usually create a new save with a timestamp, every time it saves. It´s called incremental auto-saves.

It sucks to lose work, but this is clearly a user error.

Didn't wanna say it but yeah, 100%.

Also I was kinda suspicious of the simultaneous claim that the PC randomly restarted and LO crashed. And there's no recovery file. But that's probably just me. For all the faults Windows has, failing to catch programs with unsaved work when restarting isn't one of them I've ever experienced.