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.

  • arglebargle@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    No it isn’t.

    And in the case of Word and Excel it only is enabled if you have One Drive, Office 365 subscription, or Sharepoint Online. And all of that started in 2023. Google Docs auto saves - which follows the pattern of needing to deal with state changes since the document is not local.

    None of my local apps auto save. Some do auto recovery, but they are temp files until closed. This is not the norm in 2024.

    • iegod@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      What you refer to as auto recovery is what I mean as auto save. Even your email clients do it. I will concede if you can see the value of auto recovery.