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.

  • @RememberTheApolloEnglish
    18•10 months ago

    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.