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.
Us older folks automatically hit save every few minutes. But not saving days worth of work is asking for trouble.
I'm feeling old right now, thx
I even impulsively hit Ctrl+S when writing comments on Lemmy once in a while
You have to hit Ctrl+S 3 or 4 times in a row, just in case too.
This is how I play Pokemon yellow. Save game? Better save again just in case.
I sometimes ctrl+S on my web browser.
So did you want this as an .htm archive or what)
me too, but it's beacuse that's the emacs keybinding for incremental search
I was going to say, it was absolutely drilled into our heads to save after every paragraph.
My high school teacher would occasionally flip the breaker for the computers in the school computer lab just to give those of us with bad saving habits a hard reminder.
Your teacher would probably get raked over the coals for traumatizing the kids if she did that now
Meh, only the Libreoffice kids
Young folk who have lost hours of progress in robotics programming projects too... Once is enough to learn your lesson. The inevitable second time is traumatizing. By the third time, you hit Ctrl+s five times after every paragraph.
I don’t think OP’s kid is gonna learn the lesson here. Sounds like Dad was handling the typing for her, and then when things screw up he’s blaming others for it. Not a good environment for a kid to learn in.
That was my sense too. OP isn't letting his kid learn the hard lessons for themselves.
Also what kind of an excuse is it to say she sucks at typing? With practice she will improve, so let her do her own homework
If only computers could automate repetitive tasks. Oh, well.
If only people understood the tradeoffs with automation
I still do this regularly while using Google docs even though I don’t think it has any effect.
I am an older folk. I grew up with an Apple II. I just have gotten used to autosave being on automatically in pretty much every word processor I've used since probably the mid-1990s. I just can't imagine why they decided to not have it on when you install it.
I think your memory might be failing on this, because we’re about the same age and autosave wasn’t really a common feature in the 90s. MacOS didn’t introduce autosave until OSX Lion in 2010, and Microsoft’s auto-recover (which was their only feature even close to autosave until office365) wasn’t introduced until the 2000s and didn’t work properly until 2007.
Fair. I could very well be misremembering. I don't have the greatest memory.
You should have hit Ctrl + S more throughout life.
If only it were that easy.
It does for me, but I’m autistic.
I can literally decide “I’m gonna remember this thing” and then push it into my brain in a way that I know it’ll be there forever.
It happens to me more and more these days as well.
Never assume something works until you've verified it. And even then assume it'll break some time
I mean, yes, but also it's a fair assumption to make that autosave would either be on or the fact that it was off would be communicated.
A fair assumption maybe, but not a safe one.
What word processors? Even Microsoft office doesn't have autosave on by default unless you're working off of One Drive/Share Point online.
Why would you switch to different software and assume it works the same as another?
Yep, my thoughts exactly… my company doesn’t want us to use OneDrive because of some security fears, so none of our work has autosave. Just because it’s 2024 doesn’t mean everything has autosave. Even working in a browser doesn’t always have autosave, I use some online programs daily that you have to remember to Ctrl + S.
the only time i ever lost a paper/document (at 13, for social studies), was on an apple IIc. then i rewrote it. i cried A LOT.
it has never happened since, and writing is a significant part of my job. i learned the hard way.
Different generational audiences expect different UX about their software, as this topic has aptly shown.
I'm sure there's a bunch of people who would be pissed off at the fact that they only want to control when a save happens (by default), and not the app.
Personally I would expect it to be on automatically (normal modern UX), but also after I've written big blocks of very important text I'd do a manual save, as I don't know where in the interval cycle between automatic saves I would be at (when's the next autosave happening). Best of both worlds, basically.
Finally, only because I'm talking to you right now, as far as you and your child goes, only you as their parent knows what's best for them.
Take heart that if you're trying, you're already halfway there, as many parents don't even bother.
And don't take the negative downloading you're getting on this topic as a criticism of your parenting skills, aholes on the Internet trying to keep the world exactly how they expect it to be from way back when, and are so hung up on responsibility to a fault, are not the best sources for knowledge on how well or poorly you're doing as a parent.
I as well. Still have fun memories of loading Choplifter into my Apple via a cassette tape recorder.
Thanks much.
Also, I'm going to have to go play Choplifter now!
Agreed. It's standard practice now. At the very least LibreOffice should ask you on document creation if you want it on.
There's no reason to create the extra work of the past unless you are specifically making a nostalgia product.
I'm 28, do that too. Though maybe that's what you meant by older.
No, whippersnapper, that's not what I meant ;)
Everyone learns compulsive ctrl-s eventually.
I was going to say we've all lost an essay before we learned to routinely save the document. :)
Yep. Unfortunate though this is, it's an important lesson for OP and their kiddo.
Save early and save often.
The lesson for the kiddo is more complex and harder to learn: letting daddy do stuff for you doesn’t always mean it’ll be better.
Side note : You say she's a bad typist so you type it for her. But how exactly is she going to learn how to type then?
Maybe just let her do things poorly and learn
Maybe just advise her to learn piano. Does wonders to one's typing habits.
The most mildly infuriating thing about this post is a parent not letting a child do their own work because they would do it slowly. I've read all the responses, clearly OP is not willing to reflect on what others are telling him. I just feel sorry for the child whose peers are getting practice in basic life skills that she won't have the opportunity to because her dad thinks he knows better than her teachers and the curriculum. His own ego is so wrapped up in his child writing a good essay and showing 'critical thinking' that he's not letting her do her own work. He admits to cheating. Just a wretched situation that I hope turns around when another adult steps in or his child gets old enough to tell him to back off.
While I can understand you wanting autosave on in your situation, I much prefer autosave off because I often open files to see what is in them and do not want to automatically modify them just because I accidentally hit a key and delete it. Automatically changing stuff is a choice you should have to make, not a feature that I have to race to disable.
I work with 365 and have to create docs from yesterday's version (or last weeks etc) all the time. Auto save can be a real pain in the arse.
Turn it off, save as , oh hell auto save is back on...
What freaks me out is when I open a file, make no changes, go to close it, and I get “Do you want to save the changes you made?”
Yes. Like many here, I’ve learned to hit save A LOT. But I also want to decide when the time is right. Whether I’m writing a paper, coding, photo retouching, whatever, I flail around and experiment while working. I want to lock in my changes when I’m happy with the progress. If something goes awry I’d rather resume at the last manual save than some other weird thing I did afterwards.
Never trust autosave. Everything from notepad to Visual Studio gets the Ctrl+S treatment when something is updated.
CTRL+S CTRL+S CTRL+S CTRL+S CTRL+S
Shit, did I save yet?
CTRL+S CTRL+S CTRL+S
I don't fuck around, that's how I play my games too!
I use Office 365 for work and I still CTRL+S. Something learned the hard way is hard to let go of lol
Bound quicksave to the M4 button, same as F5/refresh. I'll just spam it at all times, in all apps and games.
On the other hand.. consider if your cat had walked over the keyboard before it rebooted and replaced it all with
hhhhgggggggggggggggggggghgfbefore 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.
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.
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.
ThE sCrEeN sHoULd AuToMaTiCaLly LoCk
Auto-save can usually create a new save with a timestamp, every time it saves. It´s called incremental auto-saves.
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.
3 take aways from this that I hope you'll get:
Unless she is has some sort of disability, you typing for her just seems like enablement.
But she’s bad at it, see
Yeah and practice is useless. Everyone knows you're either born with it or not
My momma says I was born with yellow switch hands.
I wouldn’t have learned to type if a teacher hadn’t lied to me and told me that I wouldn’t be allowed to go to high school unless I could pass a basic typing test. It enraged me at the time when I found out, but it was one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me in the long run.
My mom was like you, well intentioned and getting involved a lot, to my detriment. I’ve never been able to get across to her that I would have been better off as an adult if I’d been allowed to struggle and accept consequences more as a kid. This became extremely apparent to me when I went to boarding school as an older teen, and had to catch up fast to my more self reliant peers. Getting away from people going overboard to help me was the best thing that ever happened to me, and I watched the same pattern play out with a lot of other students who had overly loving parents. The road to hell can be paved with good intentions.
Typing things for your kid is like reading things for your kid—it is such a fundamental skill that not being forced to reach your potential in it will massively change your life for the worse. My mom was a teacher for over 20 years, and the three biggest factors in success were reading ability, reading comprehension, and typing (as the modern form of writing). None of those skills are going to be obtained with anything other than exposure, practice, and time. You can give someone tools for practicing, but you can’t do the practicing for them.
I saw in your comments that your daughter has a learning disability, but all of this still stands. She will be judged against her peers as an adult, regardless of her diagnosis, so it’s best to start finding ways to work with it now.
This is the most classic case of “safety feature makes people unsafe” I’ve ever seen.
This kind of thing didn’t happen before auto save, because everyone knew to save.
Auto save exists because everyone forgot to save sometimes.
But there are other situations that manually saving wouldn't be solved and auto saving does.
Like it's easier to lose data if something happens before you manually save it. With auto saving that's more difficult as it is auto saving every x time or x changes. Yeah you could do that manually... every x minutes/work but it's something that clearly should be automated.
The main issue here was assuming something has a feature and that it has it enabled without checking if it does.
You're absolutely right. I got used to the convenience and got out of the habit of it.
The responses have classic “I run Arch” energy. It’s never the fault of the software. It’s always the fault of the user. Ignore them. This is terrible UX and should be criticised. She did absolutely nothing wrong.
Seriously, it's 2024. Everyone has to use technology now, so the software should reflect that. UX is probably one of the big barriers to widespread FOSS adoption.
This thread is absolutely terrible. I’m very sorry op. As a software dev, I think I’ve hit the save button maybe ten times in the past 2 years. You are right that it should auto save by default. That’s just required in this day and age. People saying they don’t want auto save because they don’t want cats losing their work literally do not understand how auto save works in the vast majority of modern systems. A simple example is Google sheets, where you can literally see every change made to every character in every file throughout time. You’re not going to lose anything. Software devs solved this in their own tools literally decades ago. My job is literally editing text files all day long. I can’t remember the last time I lost data due to a crash or a cat or anything.
Some people even mention LaTeX which literally has a solution with Overleaf. If software doesn’t autosave in this day and age, it’s shit software.
What you have here is another case of Linux users jumping to defend the only things they have to defend, even if it’s absolute shit.
Man, maybe I just grew up in a different time and/or environment but I still to this day manually save obsessively. I use VSCode most days and feel like I'm constantly hitting the save hotkey. With that said though, I am just not a fan of most autosaves. I like to know what the current contents are and whether or not I have unsaved changes.
That's just me though.
Yeah, I don’t trust the auto save to save my work properly. I work as a Software Engineer, and any small change I make, even if I’m not done with the change and I’m just thinking, my hands immediately default to CTRL+S.
Always always make sure your work is being saved if it means something to you. Especially since windows will force update and reboot your computer. Battery’s can die, power can go out and your computer shuts down. Applications can and will crash.
Mmm. I grew up in a different time too. Makes me ponder how the software circumstances of that time built in us a very different idea of what an iteration actually is, when it comes to writing. The fact that we couldn't go back and atomically dissect the history of a piece. That a draft, and an edit, were something heavier. Maybe we'd have to think a bit more slowly and carefully before irreversibly casting a previous version into the ether.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not making a "gen z bad" post. Just reflecting on how things are different these days, and maybe it leads to a different kind of work.
Lots of VSCode extensions appear to assume manual save is on, so if you have autosave, they spam notifications like crazy. "Ooh you have syntax error in your config, please fix this now >:((((("
Notifications were what made me abandon vscode lol
So out of curiosity, what did you move to and do you use autosaving? I'm always willing to try out other text editors but it'll take something impressive to make me start autosaving.
I grew up in that different time too, but I completely agree with the person you're replying to.
Auto save is a must. No arguments. You can have personal preferences and behaviours that make you want to disable autosaving and control your saves manually, that's perfectly fine, but that's you and your preference. A modern application should absolutely have autosaving enabled by default. Anything else is user unfriendly and indefensible.
Thank you! My God, the amount of holier-than-thou "it's your own fault" in this thread is mildly infuriating in and of itself. Auto save and versioning have been a thing in Word for at least 8 years, probably over a decade but that's the first version mentioned in their docs, and I struggle to think much software I use regularly that doesn't have some form of it. Hell, even the new Notepad on Windows keeps your changes when it's accidentally closed.
I like most open source software but this sort of attitude in the community and what seems like an absolute disdain for any UX concept from the past 20 years makes me very hesitant to recommend it almost anyone outside very specific technical circles.
People make mistakes, that's why we automate things. If a system relies on a human not making mistakes it is doomed to fail eventually.
Saving manually should be a feature, but autoaave should be on by default these days, unless 30+ years of people losing work due to not hitting "save" manually has taught us nothing.
Crashes happen. Errors happen. Pets and children happen. Any major document editor should be able to auto save and replay a very long history of actions.
Improve the system, because you can't improve people with a code patch.
Funny how OP is using libreoffice on Windows though, what's there Linux-related to defend? Did a Linux user hurt you? If anything this is another opportunity for some snarky comment about Windows being shit and crashing for no reason since the 1990s.
Thank you.
“The year is 2024. Any car that doesn’t automatically brake when it encounters an obstacle is a shit car”
While the above may be true, it’s definitely not a reason to say:
“I shouldn’t have to use my brakes”
So in unrelated news I had to replace a keycap because... yeah.
First of all, as a time honored tradition it is customary to say this: Never, ever trust an autosave. Manual saves and backup, always.
With that out of the way, yeah, libre office is kinda bad at the regular user stuff. If you aren't a fiddler who goes through options first and sets their own personal preferences, a bad time will be had.
Also, apparently crashes might reset the auto save tick depending on the version used, so check twice if it happens again just to make sure.
Ps: Never had an issue with it personally, but it's hit or miss with its users.
Oh just fucking great. Thanks for telling me that. I think I might just try a different office suite.
You can always try OpenOffice if libre office isn't working out for you. It has all the same suite options as libre office. I think it has auto save by default. I haven't used it in a while though.
Unpopular opinion: Word, Excel, and Powerpoint are free on the web. Yes, you need a Microsoft account. Would it be ideal to use a FOSS product? Maybe. But schools and workplaces have a preference for Microsoft Office, so the specific skills in that office suite are going to more easily translate to real world situations, and there will be a lower chance of compatibility issues when sharing documents with other people or organizations, in either direction.
i wouldnt push excel hard here on the web. its still pretty fragile/full of incompatibilities to the point i cant use it in my day to day, i have to open the local application.
Newer versions don't have the issue.
She didn't lose her essay because the software didn't autosave, she lost her essay because she didn't save!
Sadly she had to learn the hard way, as I remember when writing exam papers my rhythm went something like this:
Type type Ctrl+s ... Type type Ctrl+s ... Type type Save as on USB ... Type type Ctrl+s ...
I've got ctrl+s hard-coded into me early on. Every paragraph I'll save.
I do miss hitting save and looking over at the floppy light to make sure it's updating haha.
Type type save... :looks over for spin click click blinky: ... good...
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.
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
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.
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.)
On the upside, doing the same essay again is so much easier and usually comes out way better.
Yes. If anything, if I were an english teacher, at some point I’d have my kids turning in the same essay four or five times, just to show them how good things can get when they remake them again and again.
First thing you teach someone who is going to use a computer, is to save the document every 4 minutes. Who knows when the power will go out... But I am sorry for her essay, and thanks for telling me that autosave feature is disabled by default. I would have never known.
and make sure you press Ctrl+S at least five times every time you want to save. I swear it sometimes doesn't work the first time.
You can set VSCode to autosave pretty much every keystroke. you should be able to do that for all office apps too IMO
This is user error. Everyone knows to save.
Not really, autosave has been a thing for so many years at this point
So has automatic braking in cars.
/s
I agree and disagree at the same time.
I agree, people should learn how to use technology.
I disagree, technology should be easy to use.
to be fair, word doesn't autosave either (unless you're using onedrive)
Do you mean OneDrive? There is an auto-recovery option Word separately from OneDrive that saves a copy every X number of minutes.
Thank you, I was losing my mind reading some comments like that. I had my pc crush 2 times while writing my thesis. I completely freaked out the first time, but word showed me a couple of auto saved versions! Phew! And I don't use one drive.
Is onecloud a new product or do you mean OneDrive?. Honest question because I have never heard of that but it doesn't mean Microsoft didn't release a new product.
OwnCloud+OneDrive = onecloud?
yeah i mean onedrive
Autosave should always be seen as a back up option that covers unexpected closes or whatever. It shouldn’t really be a thing to rely on as the main option.
You never have to worry about a document saving if you make sure it’s actually saved by manually saving before closing.
Just Ctrl + S every few sentences.
I learned to use MS Office back in the days of Word97. Things were so unstable back then we were taught to hit save every paragraph
I work as a video editor. I have premiere pro/after effects autosave every 15 minutes but I always manually save every major changes that I make. It's automatic to me. Ctrl+s, Ctrl+s, Ctrl+s
When I got a macro keypad for my editing workstation, the first custom key I defined was ctrl-s
At the risk of being that asshole who tells a parent how to raise their child based off a single post online, how do you expect her to become a better typist if you do it for her? She's 13, she's probably not gonna be that good at anything, she's at the age where she's supposed to be learning things (and that includes skills like typing).
Maybe I'm just projecting my own parents' shortcomings onto you, but they often just did things for me instead of helping me learn. I think I would be a better, more well-rounded human today if they had pushed me to be a bit more independent. I'm sure you're doing this out of love for your daughter, but I think you might not be doing her any favours by doing a portion of the work yourself. If she decides to pursue post-secondary education, are you still going to type her essays for her? What about if she gets a job that involves typing?
My mom used to do things for me instead of letting me learn, but only the things it would be painful for me to learn, because she couldn’t handle seeing me suffer.
She died when I was 26 years old, and it was only then that I finally started to develop some of the necessary life skills I should have been learning when I was a teenager.
Being too soft on kids is cruel because the adult pays for it so hard.
if i could parent my oldest kid again, i would let him struggle more and fail more.
the inevitable rude awakening was ROUGH.
edit - grammar
I support Office365 in an education environment and you wouldn't believe the number of documents lost to autosave. Autosave and document recovery are definitely nice and useful to have, but they're not infallible. Shit happens and when it does, it's when you're finishing up your midterm the night before it's due.
You need to save, and save often. And if the project you're working on is "super important it's 50% of my grade" make backups. Even just saving a copy to a flash drive is better than nothing.
I might end up throwing in the towel and going with that or Google Docs, but, and I know these are just a child's school essays, I hate giving Microsoft and Google more data just on principle because who the hell knows what they're doing with all that data.
Libreoffice will likely still work fine for you, especially now that you've got autosave turned on. Heck, I have faculty that refuse to use anything other than LibreOffice, so I have it installed in our computer labs. As long as you're saving and backing up reasonably often, you should be good to go. Though your school likely has a cloud suite that you could use too. Office365 and Google Workspaces are by far the most popular. It would be integrated with your daughter's student email which I can't imagine a modern school not having. If you're not sure, contact the school and they'd be able to help you.
I'm sorry your kid lost her paper! It's always a bummer to take a call and it's a kid crying because their paper went up in smoke. If you haven't already, contact the teacher and let them know what happened. IME most teachers are reasonable and as long as "office ate my homework" isn't your go-to excuse, they'll give you an extension.
I appreciate it, thanks. It's all been sorted out now, so we can just move on and we've both learned a lesson.
In addition to the other comment, if your school has a paid O365 or Google account it’s far less likely that they’re vacuuming up your data because you’re now an enterprise account that they actually care about keeping, unlike a personal account. Even more so if it’s an account for a child, which usually requires stricter privacy controls.
Honestly though, as much much as I despise Microsoft and Google, I would never recommend anything else to my parents / family because I know they just don’t care as much as I do, and they’re not willing to learn or change anything. It doesn’t sound like you’re quite that way, but perhaps still less comfortable with something that’s not 100% rock solid. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to go with some of these paid services if it means you’re going to be happier.
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
"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?
Easy access to usable version control would help in both cases
I teach my students to do manual save every 5 minutes. Just hit ctl+s and it's done. I basically save everytime I make a change in a project. I've learn the hard way while working on my thesis piece. Pretty much cost me 6 months of my life.
EDIT: Here is my save/backup story.
Did you edit your thesis for six months without saving?
I know people that used to rely on the document recovery in Word to save their documents. Every day they'd recover the document they wanted to work on.
Holy mother. That's like jumping in front of a train every evening and relying on the groundhog day to wake you up in your bed again in the morning.
Yeah it terrified me once I found out. Some people think of the strangest workflows. (relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1172/)
😮
lol yea this makes no sense
The story: It was a composition, score + electroacoustic piece. (music master’s). At some point, I made a backup save on an external drive and forgot to change back the save location to my internal drive. One day I was using the vacuum cleaner, the hard disk power cable got caught in the vacuum cleaner and fell out. The external drive was broken, and I realized I had been making all of my saves on it. I’ve lost months of work, had to start over the piece, and I wasn’t able to submit my piece and thesis until the following semester. Now I teach computer music and I always tell that story to my students lol.
My thesis was versioned using SVN on my server and I had a remote backup at my parents. And stored on both my laptop and desktop.
I had online backup of the written part. It was 12+ years ago so even that wasn't that common. But the main project was a composition, score + electroacoustic piece. (music master’s). At some point, I made a backup save on an external drive and forgot to change back the save location to my internal drive. One day I was using the vacuum cleaner, the hard disk power cable got caught in the vacuum cleaner and fell out. The external drive was broken, and I realized I had been making all of my saves on it. I’ve lost months of work, had to start over the piece, and I wasn’t able to submit my piece and thesis until the following semester. Now I teach computer music and I always tell that story to my students lol.
You rebel you
It was a composition, score + electroacoustic piece. (music master's). At some point, I made a backup save on an external drive and forgot to change back the save location to my internal drive. One day I was using the vacuum cleaner, the hard disk power cable got caught in the vacuum cleaner and fell out. The external drive was broken, and I realized I had been making all of my saves on it. I've lost months of work, had to start over the piece, and I wasn't able to submit my piece and thesis until the following semester. Now I teach computer music and I always tell that story to my students lol.
Seems like a nice feature then would be to have a person review the save file path once every week or so.
Prompt first of course, for privacy reasons.
I bought a rooster because I don't trust my phones alarm to go off in the morning
That’s a good idea. I swear this thing is trying to get me fired.
Ok hear me out, what I'm gonna say is probably not the thing most people would like to hear but here I go:
To write things down, I use ghostwriter and it does have autosave feature. Sure, it's just a markdown writer however it's great for distraction-free writing too. You can just use ghostwriter to write things and if you still need it in an office document, you can copy-paste it into LibreOffice.
This is what I do with notepad++.
BBEdit for me.
Definitely checking this out later, been looking for a decent Markdown editor for a while
As a person who tried a lot of markdown editors, ghostwriter is my definite number one.
Obsidian also.
What is the purpose of this vs just typing it in libreoffice? Genuine question, I just don't understand the advantage/habit/whatever
Nah, she lost it, because your Thinkpad suddenly rebooted. Investigate that first.
And must be a distro-specific thing, it's on here by default.
Read the first line of the post, this poor Thinkpad is still a Windows machine.
Yup, missed it. That explains the defaults too.
10fastfingers.com for your daughter. Or any of the hundreds of other games and tests and practice tools. Being able to type well is an important skill in this life that she'll need.
On auto save: it should be a trivial option that's always on and always reliably saves -multiple- copies of your work
On auto save: on small files auto save can be a good idea, as long as it is easy to jump through revisions.
I'd recommend https://www.typingclub.com/ for specifically learning touch typing with finger placement etc.
or https://www.keybr.com/ to focus on words containing keys I struggle with.
Oof. I think most of us have lost work like this. I kind of think it's a rite of passage. It's how you learn to save. Good luck with the rewrite!
Sounds like she learned a lesson in the value of building the habit of doing a quick ctrl-s every minute or so, no matter what program you are using.
She didn't because it was the parent doing the typing and it was the parent who retyped everything after losing the save.
Even moreso important to ctrl+s in case you trust autosave too much then it corrupts a file that closes too soon
looking at you ms publisher that one day the other week
My daughter lost...
We lost everything...
I forgot to save...
I can't recommend OnlyOffice enough. I just did a test repeatedly killing the application and the document is recovered with the default settings.
I'll check it out. Thanks!
Learn to save often, but especially learn the limitations of the tools you have. It's not libreoffice's fault if you don't.
Lol. We came this far that forgetting to save is caused by shitty software...
Good UX and quality of life features should prevent users from having mishaps like this. So yeah it's shitty in this regard.
I was curious and found this thread.
https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/libreoffice-writer-crash-and-autosave-is-off-by-default/92416/4
Apparently the newest version will enable auto save by default. Not sure why it wasn’t that way to begin with…
I dislike autosaves in word processors/spreadsheets etc and turn them off whenever I can. I prefer to have that control, I have had issues where I have deleted things to rewrite/update them, decide against it and close the app only to find it's overwritten what I had done....
Have you tried using file versioning, or using review (track changes) functions to propose changes so you can choose to accept edits or decide against them? It's like there are specific features for this scenario that allow you to save, have backups and have that control.
yeh, those are solutions, I was just explaining how its not automatically better.
Latex documents in git are the best option technically, but good luck getting the average person (or me!) to do that.
I don't mind auto saving in places that keep versioning. But by default for LibreOffice does sound as dangerous as not having it.
Fair enough… it is impossible to make everyone happy lol.
Thinkpad spontaneously rebooting has some part in the blame here too, no? I mean that’s why this whole fiasco happened..
If you’re on a Windows PC oftentimes you can go to the user temp folder and find the working document there. %temp% in file explorer.
You might have to do a little digging to find out what/where it is, sometimes they’re nice and obvious in a folder named for the app creating it, sometimes it’s a string of nonsensical alphanumeric characters.
Also: You can go to the “Tools” followed by “Options” then go to “LibreOffice” and click on “Path”, temp and backup files are stored at the location listed there, too.
Either way, I highly, highly suggest you dig around for the lost doc in that folder. It’s saved my butt a couple times when I forgot to save.
Thank you for the help!
Good luck.
Thank you for posting this. I hadn't run into this problem, and now I won't.
Manual save made sense when a disk write froze the program for seconds and engaged the disk drive with sounds (which I miss a little; very reassuring) but today autosave ought to be fully expected. LibreOffice really should've had it on by default.
That comforting hum/scratch sound. 👍🏽
The 6 shucked drives in my poorly sound insulated server still make those clicks when Backblaze runs, and it makes me most satisfied (and occasionally a little paranoid).
I disagree it should be on by default. What if you're opening up a file that you've already saved and you want to take a look and see if a new color scheme works or you move stuff around just to give it a try. Then it saves automatically and you close it down.
Turning auto save on is a deliberate move, and means you know its on.
No Backup no pity
No Save no pity
Manually save often. She learned the hard lesson all of us learn. I never rely on autosave anywhere. It does not always do it's job.
You lost it because you didn't save. You are a parent, it's time to take responsibility for your mistakes. Don't blame LO as if you were 13 y/o.
From my original post:
From your original title:
Yes? And it was my fault for not saving because of that.
I'm not sure why you saw me explicitly saying it's my fault and are trying to tell me that's not what I said, but it's not a very good form of gaslighting.
Some weeks ago I wrote my probabilities homework on LaTeX, every couple of lines I press F5 to compile and see how it was looking. I was pretty sure that compiling automatically saved the project, but I was wrong and lost and entire night of LaTeX work. Now I know that I need to manually save first, after that compiling save the project and the compiled pdf when F5.
I suspect losing a LaTeX doc hurt more than a 'word' doc
At least in LaTeX I'm not losing any "original toughs", I first do the exercises on paper and pen and then format it on latex to send to my professor, but I'm not really used to it, so the writing process involve a lot of looking on internet how to do things.
I think it depends. In my case, I write faster in LaTeX as the formatting is done a lot quicker. Just need to find one template I've already used and is aproppiate for the ocassion.
Although being able to take a screenshot and paste it is a huge bonus and time saver in LibreOffice when taking notes in real time.
It has been a few years (shit near 15 years) since I used LaTex, and I didn't use it that often so it wasn't ingrained. But even then it was much easier than trying to get publisher for format things
FYI: It does have the option to save automatically:
Thanks, that's what I turned on. My problem was it wasn't on already.
You are right. Only autorecovery was on by default, but I had to manually enable automatic saving.
At work i use a $800 proprietary shit software that has a 70% chance of crashing when printing (so it crashes when job is done)
So I got used to Ctrl+S every. Single. Sentence.
Windows 10 home loves to automatically reboot to install the fucking updates IMMEDIATELY. RIGHT. NOW. And Microsoft pushed some big update just a few days ago. When LibreOffice crashes usually there's a recovery feature. It's windows. Windows wanted to install the fucking updates and it told LibreOffice to gracefully close RIGHT NOW, and NO, THE USER DOESN'T WANT TO SAVE, the user wants to get updates immediately ASAP
Btw automatically saving is a generally undesirable feature as it could reduce the lifetime of ssds, slowdown the system if the file Is big or stored on slow media like network.
No it doesn't. Maybe it can happen if you neglect to reboot your pc in ages but normally it never ever happens.
It hasn't happened to me ever and won't because I shutdown the computer at night.
So the solution to forced rebooting is to have to suffer through the ridiculous boot times for windows every day?
Sure. Linux boots faster. But boot time on Windows is still measured in seconds.
Just let Windows update occasionally.
Timeline of Windows users:
Users: Fuck you Microsoft why do I get viruses*?
MS: Okay we will give you security updates.
Users: No, I don't want to update or ever reboot, you idiot.
MS: Okay, you do you.
Users: Why do I still get viruses?
MS: How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?
Users: Just fix it.
MS: Fine.
Users: Why is my computer rebooting?
*Virus in this context refers to any security problems.
Patchday is once a month. No need to reboot every day. Also, what "ridiculous boot time"? What hardware do you have?
Wait, all this time I thought that LibreOffice sutosaved after doing the first manual save. Oof, how do I turn it on, just in case?
It's in the settings. There's a load/save option on the side bar.
I'll try that after I get home D: thanks
Never rely on autosaves for anything, ever.
Always save first, and name the file.
Er, you lost your daughters essay because you assumed that autosave was enabled.
Even if its on by default, first thing you should do when installing or first using it is adjust the settings imo. How often is still a matter of personal choice. And other settings are as well. Granted, I get I'm probably far from the average given how much I like to tinker with settings and customizing toolbars, etc. Still agree it should be on by default along with some basic version history to undo unwanted autosaves.
Or have a VCS by default.
One time I couldn't work on an assignment at school because I typed it in Microsoft works and school used Microsoft word.
Make them play Fallout NV, and then
TEACH. YOUR. KID. TO. SAVE.
Damn, you got hit with a severe case of triple bad luck (machine, software and humanness).
As someone who thanks to you got reminded to look at their software backup settings, thanks for your sacrifice.
Bad UX design is pretty ingrained in many FOSS projects unfortunately.
Sorry you forgot to save but I don't see how this is the fault of the libreoffice community. I also think cheating isn't the right answer at all but that's not really my place.
Maybe you should do a hardware test as it is really not normal for devices to just reboot. I would start with a RAM test then move on to a stress test for a few hours.
Auto save on by default is not an unreasonable request. If they just wanted to request it, this is not the place. However, is hey wanted to vent and discuss, so this seems like the place.
I personally don't really care for autosave but I see where he's coming from. However I don't like the fact that he seems to blame a community project for his daughters misfortune. It sucks that it happened to him but I don't think its constructive to vent in this community.
I like auto save, but it should never be needed and should never overwrote the user saved file. For recovery purposes only.
In this case, it sounds like an os crash, which is not libre office fault, but libre office having auto save by default would have saved it.
I think they have taken the wrong approach. Helping daughter but they write it and learn to type faster. Also a learning experience for software in general and auto save.
Yeah its not really anyone's fault in this case. I think it is more of a lessons learned than anything.
Thanks, didn't know it had an autosave feature, but I do now. Your story is appreciated
I had a similar problem. I had made a bunch of changes to a document and just closed LibreOffice Calc thinking it would prompt me to save it. It did not. It just exited and discarded my changes. I went in that day and turned on AutoSave.
Weird, it prompts for me
I love that there are still kids learning this hard lesson in the year 2024.
LMAO blaming the software because you're too dumb to hit Ctrl + s. Presumably you're old enough to have been taught to save often. Now maybe your daughter will learn from your fuck up and actually SAVE HER WORK.
Also she's never going to learn to type well if you just do it for her. Get her Mavis Beacon for Christmas this year and stop doing her homework for her.
Auto save option that isn't enabled by default is some evil design. 😬
Technically, Office doesn't have auto save enabled unless you sync it with OneDrive or enable it in settings or GPO.
I agree. Autosave should be enabled by default.
This is why I do all my drafts in n++
New 12 and new 6 have savede quite a few times.
Jesus never loses any data.
Because Jesus saves.
Learning how to properly save and backup is the more important lesson anyway.
I'll be the devil's advocate. A little.
LibreOffice being FOSS probably means developers are mostly using it together with other FOSS. This brings some benefits, like a journaled filesystem, that sort of make the autosave useless. That recovery process that failed for you? It wouldn't have on something like btrfs or ext4 and, consequently, you wouldn't have been in a position where you're typing up this post.
Having said that, on bs OSes like windows autosave probably should be the default.
I hate Windows so much. Her school requires it for a small handful of reasons and I don't really want to fuck with getting those particular occasional use pieces of software to work in Linux, so we're sticking with Win 10 for now. I hear 11 is worse.
This is why I rather use something like Google docs, even though I’m not a fan of Google, it saves automatically and has a version history I can revert to.
This is clearly a layer-8-problem.