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.
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).
It’s interesting to watch those YouTube videos where people take floppy disk drives and use them as musical instruments to play out songs.
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.