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.

  • @IHawkMike
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    -210 months ago

    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.

    • @SkippingRelax
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      110 months ago

      Or not trusting autosave because they lost a document once in the 80s when autosave didn’t exist, and now they tell everyone to compulsively press ctrl-s because software can be trusted enough to drive a car, but not save a file every minute or so. Bonus point when they introduce themselves as I’m a software developer…

      • @[email protected]
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        410 months ago

        Yeah so maybe when we trust software to drive cars, then we can talk about trusting autosave.