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.
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.
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.
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.
I just can’t imagine why they decided to not have it on when you install it.
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 am an older folk. I grew up with an Apple II.
I as well. Still have fun memories of loading Choplifter into my Apple via a cassette tape recorder.
And “save as” every few times (or every time if the document is important).
I lost a lot of work hours once because I was using a program that saved a backup copy every time you saved (so that you'd always be able to recover the previous version), and the damn thing crashed while saving, thus corrupting both the save file and the backup. Never. Again. Hard drive space is less expensive than my time and what's left of my mental health.
I worked as a kitchen designer and for each customer’s meeting I’d made a new file with everything the same except the date in the filename. So worst case I’d lose a day’s work.
I'm barely an adult and I do this. I think it's less your age, and more the type of programs you tend to use—ei. programs where you may not want things auto saved, for me game engine, but there's plenty of examples.
Ignoring that this would get faster with the practise of typing it themselves:
How quickly are people writing essays these days? I'm a decently fast typer and it always took me a couple of hours to write a whole essay at that age. Once I was a few years older and was diligent in drafting a really good outline first I'd maybe get it to under a hour at the computer, but the speed of typing was never the bottleneck.
As a side note, typing well isn't something that can easily be learned by simply typing more. If her typing is a concern (and it may well be since she'll be typing much more in college), it may be helpful to search for some typing courses. My impression is that there are some free online ones, but I don't remember any off the top of my head.
Then let it take hours. That’s how you learn. She’s not going to learn to remember to save regularly if you just sweep the mistake under the rug and do the heavy lifting for her the second time around.
The only way I learned how to type growing up was from instant messaging my friends. All of those ridiculous typing programs didn't help. One random thing that might help is a different keyboard, or, different profile keycaps!
I love me some mechanical keyboards and I like the tactile feedback from "brown" switches. The last one I built I found out about the wonderful world of keycaps, specifically keycap profiles. I fell in love with MT3s as they are a little "cupped". My fingers sort of fall into the scoops and get enough tactile feedback to stay on the key and they just feel nice. I haven't looked at cheaper membrane keyboards in years, but I remember you could pull off the keycaps and put different ones on those, but I have no idea how they are now.
If you are interested in mechanical keyboards, you can usually buy a sample kit that has all of the different switches and you may be able to find something similar for keycaps.
I guess what I am trying to say is a different keyboard, or even keycaps, may help her learn. Though I do realize that this stuff is expensive too. As someone who is on a keyboard everyday, it became a tool to invest in.
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.
Exactly. I don't want my computer doing things without me telling it to. If I want it to save the file I will tell it to save the file. If I don't tell it to save the file, I most definitely don't want it to save it behind my back. Auto save is an anti-pattern, especially if it overwrites your manual save files.
(Saving an independent recovery file, preferably including undo and redo history, might come in handy in case of crashes, sure, but it should be optional and never on by default, out of privacy concerns; other users might use the computer, and it's safer to assume that the previous user might not want others to see the documents they had open last time.)
Just mark it as final then. This whole thread is infuriating. People working themselves into pretzels with their misguided reasons for not wanting auto-save when they really just don't know to use the software.
OP is right. I use Office 365 and haven't lost work on a document in over 10 years. Auto-save absolutely should be the default.
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.
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.
Is that because of bugs, or shitty software that you don't trust autosave? Isn't it likely that ctrl-s is affected by the same problem and regardless of how compulsively you press the combo, it does in fact nothing?
Note that OPs instance simply had autosave disabled, not really a trust issue
Autosave has intervals, shit can happen between those intervals
I've lost good work to a program crash / power outage / other sudden loss of work enough times to know that trusting autosave when it's there is a fools move
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Learn to save often. Sometimes that means 5x in a row just to be sure.
Never just assume the software is going to save you from yourself. Its OK to trust software, but you gotta make sure it does what you expect it to do. In this case, that means either checking those settings when you start out, or making sure the file exists on disk.
Invest in some typing games for your kid so they learn how to type properly and can do their own work! I understand wanting to help your kid succeed, but you can't do that in the long term without crippling their development.
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.
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.
No worries LibreOffice has ancestry going back to CP/M (via StarOffice) so it's on the DOS side of things: Of course it's the fault of the software, it's not a Unix native program.
How? How is this terrible? Why should autosave be expected? I absolutely do not like autosave. No thanks. It is an unusual behaviour, why would anyone expect it to do this?
That said, it is really weird that it didn't recover. I have never hard Libre office not recover from a computer outage or even a forced shutdown. That is unexpected.
You're weird. Autosave is the norm in 2024. It's not unusual at all, and helps in the most important of use cases; accidental non-saving. It was the norm a decade ago.
Lol she didn't do anything. It was the op doing his daughter's work for her that didn't save it.
That's the most troubling part of this story, that the op doesn't insist their child learn how to type. I'm wondering how much of their other work they do for her.
Libre office is open source, btw. If it's so poorly designed op can go and fix it.
People have said "I lost everything because of Microsoft Word." "I lost everything because of Wordpad." "I lost everything because of Notepad." You guys probably blame schools for not teaching your kids how to laundry, taxes, or change a tire.
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.
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
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.
I mean, it is? I don't even use LibreOffice, but god I'm thinking of my help desk days and dealing with people getting angry at everything except themselves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
First of all, as a time honored tradition it is customary to say this: Never, ever trust an autosave.
I've worked in IT and software development for 25 years, and this is literally the first time I hear someone say this, never mind call it a 'tradition' to say it.
You worked in IT, not with IT. You made the bugs, but didn't experience them.
Your tradition is having users calling you for the dumbest of things and everyone you know calling you to fix their electronics.
We are not the same.
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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
What is wrong whit your computer and why do you say that others should press ctrl-s five times like we were practising magic? Report a bug with the software that you use if it doesnt work, or replace your keyboard
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.
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.
I type things in for her because she’s a really bad typist, but she tells me what to write…
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.
I think OP has explained that he does let her type when it's a shorter document. Which I think is perfectly reasonable at this age.
I couldn't type very well until I took a dedicated typing class at school when I was 13. By the end of the semester, I was faster than 95% of all typists worldwide. Maybe OP's kid might be interested in a class like that next year. And if not, she'll still get better over time even if she isn't typing these long essays right now.
Basically, give her (and OP) a break. They're doing fine.
Edit: also, I don't think you're an asshole for offering your input. Nothing wrong with that. It just comes off as a bit overly judgemental given OP is guilty of... occasionally typing his daughter's longer essays to save time (a finite resource that any parent has a limited quantity of).
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?
I'd argue that you should let her type, even on a long essay. There's no shortcut to learning how to type, and unless the essay is on a tight deadline, depriving her of the learning opportunity will only delay this crucial ability.
If you're afraid that she will not be able to focus on the essay contents while typing, she can try drafting the essay up with pen on paper first.
In my experience, the longer you type, the faster you get at typing.
That's like getting into the rhythm. If you do it a little and then stop, then you never become proficient as you never got into that flow.
Try learning a guitar by pulling a few strings a day. Try learning to read in a different language by reading a few letters each time. Try running by taking a few steps.
Doesn't it sound ridiculous?
Have you ever tried learning a different language? You don't become proficient by reading one sentence, then stopping and then another one. You do it by struggling through many, and the more you do it, the faster you learn.
Note, I'm not writing this because "boohoo, bad parenting." It's the first essay, who cares. (although her being 13 does make me raise a brow. I'd expect it with a 7 y.o., but 13? w/e, you do you). I just think you have a misunderstanding in how learning core-level skills work. Continuous repetition is the key.
Another glaring example is how toddlers learn languages. In a span of a couple of years, they are capable of learning a language to native level with absolutely no prior knowledge, just by listening and trying to repeat the sounds day in and day out. Just think about it.
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
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.
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.
What does MS say when you report these to them? Is it always the same bug still unfixed or separate issues? Nothing is infallible with software, but note that in ops case autosave was disabled so no mystery "autosave lost my document", it was just disabled.
And ffs autosave is just a timer that saves the document every x minutes the same way a user would do if they pressed save. I do believe you get many issues reported to you, but I doubt Microsoft autosave is so buggy to cause an unbelievable amount of data loss in a single institution (and I love to shit on MS).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Personally I only use ghostwriter if I need to do writing but I write this because ghostwriter has autosave feature (apparently LibreOffice also has this but I didn't know about it until this thread, so is OP). However it's still could be beneficial because of the format-free writing and a very clean user interface.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
I'm sorry, I don't understand what your point is. Is it that it was wrong that we worked on one of the first real essays she's ever had to write together, something I'm supposed to do as the appointed learning coach by her online school? Or was it me saying that it was a loss for her much more than a loss for me because she was the one who did the hard work and will be graded on it?
Sure she isn't great at typing but typing is how you get good at typing. You can't expect a professional essay by a 13 year old and I expect teachers to know this. Just let children learn, fail an learn by failing.
She would also have learned to save if you had let her do this instead.
I don't know how educational systems work where you are but I expect homework to be adjusted to reasonable expectations. Why get involved beyond giving advice and maybe going through it when it's done
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.
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.
I recommend putting some time into figuring out why the laptop is spontaneously rebooting. Check the event log as a start. Otherwise this same issue is going to happen with another app and it probably won't have anything to do with whether or not that app autosaves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know what kind of files you write regularly, but even the smallest and cheapest PCIe 3.0 NVMe drive can store data at 600 megabytes per second or more. That's plenty fast enough for my office documents at least. And you can rewrite the entire contents of the drive a hundred times or more before it fails. So I wouldn't lose any sleep over having autosave on.
Is this SSD failure after 100 rewrites localized? Or is it just the sum total of data saved to it that causes this? Because if it’s localized, autosave is gonna use up your 100 safe writes in the first hour.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I guess it's about what one's used to. I'd be pretty annoyed if it started overwriting my documents when I when I do not explicitly tell it to do that.
I copy something from the document, maybe hit cut instead of copy. Now it's gone from the original.
I'm not sure what you mean by overwriting. With something like Office365 or Google Docs, it saves each time you type or delete a character. I don't see any reason why that couldn't be the same with FOSS software.
Overwrinting as saving the (unwanted) changes over the file.
I know the workflow on these collaborative online tools is like that. I also don't see a reason why an offline tool can't be like that, but I think turning it on by default would cause more bad surprises for people who don't expect it to do things unannounced and without asking.
I guess this is something the program could ask on initial startup and make the editor UI very clear on what the state is.
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.
That could be a great learning experience. If it's an important document not only do I save regularily, I also create copies of the file at regular intervals.
As someone who used LaTeX in secondary school, this is definitely not applicable advice to everyone. Great if you're doing maths or other technical subjects, but superfluous if you're doing anything else. Doubly so for someone who isn't a great typist.
this is definitely not applicable advice to everyone
Thanks, I wrote "might" for a reason.
In my experience it's the superior toolset for regular texts over five pages and Overleaf takes away all setup hassle. Unless you're writing about Overleaf in particular, you're off topic anyway.
Yeah, foss softwares are full of these 'design flaws' for some reason. Take for exemple the 'single click to open files' that was the default on KDE for so long despite everyone reverting it back to double click.
they're both bad UX, which FOSS is generally pretty bad at, probably because there's not as much overlap between people who who are really into FOSS and people who are really into UX
linux-centric communities also tend to be plagued by elitism, which i expect stifles a lot of this kind of thing before proper conversations can take root
Single click is fantastic. I don't understand why anyone would do it differently. Everything on the web is single click. Task bar items are single click. Menu items are single click.
KDE got single click right when Microsoft didn't.
So why would I not want a single unified experience? I don't accidently open anything, that is just nonsense.