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.

  • YerboutiEnglish
    284·
    9 months ago

    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.

      • dan@upvote.auEnglish
        17·
        9 months ago

        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.

        • YerboutiEnglish
          2·
          9 months ago

          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.

        • YerboutiEnglish
          3·
          9 months ago

          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.

      • YerboutiEnglish
        3·
        9 months ago

        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.

        • intensely_human@lemm.eeEnglish
          3·
          9 months ago

          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.