My daughter lost her social studies essay because LibreOffice doesn't have autosave on automatically.
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.
The amount of times I've fucked up my template documents for forms and had to go back and revert them because they were autosaving and I hadn't set them to read only makes me not a huge fan of autosave being on automatically. Is the problem easily solvable? Yes. Have I somehow still not gotten used to autosave even though it's the norm for like a decade at least? Also, yes. But there it is. A reason why for you.
Auto saving versions is the solution. Don't like the one from 5 minutes ago? How about 10 minutes ago? How about 15? Etc
Incremental auto saves, I like it
The versioning is how I revert them. Making them read only so I can only save change in a new file is how to actually prevent the issue in the first place.
"Easily solvable" is an understatement, though. Autosave should maintain parity with the undo buffer, and manual saves should be pointers to a specific point in time, like tags. The only way this gets complex is branching - if you go back in time and start making changes from there, do we just prune it, do we allow the user to go back and undo undo, or, if we have something decidedly less fucking garbage than MS Word, do we facilitate merging?
I'm talking about my specific issue when I say that it's easily solvable. Fixing the problem is as simple as making sure the template files are read only and if I do forget to do that revert them back to before I made edits using versioning.
I suppose, but I'd argue that in your case the deficiencies are even more obnoxious: modifying a template should require deliberate effort on your part, with the default save action automatically creating and switching to a new file - otherwise why even have template filetypes?
I don't have it saved as a different filetype. It's just a .docx. I'm not even sure there is a "template" filetype available with word. Maybe I should look into it.
Easy access to usable version control would help in both cases