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My daughter lost her social studies essay because LibreOffice doesn't have autosave on automatically.

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.

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  • I'll be the devil's advocate. A little.

    LibreOffice being FOSS probably means developers are mostly using it together with other FOSS. This brings some benefits, like a journaled filesystem, that sort of make the autosave useless. That recovery process that failed for you? It wouldn't have on something like btrfs or ext4 and, consequently, you wouldn't have been in a position where you're typing up this post.

    Having said that, on bs OSes like windows autosave probably should be the default.

    • I hate Windows so much. Her school requires it for a small handful of reasons and I don't really want to fuck with getting those particular occasional use pieces of software to work in Linux, so we're sticking with Win 10 for now. I hear 11 is worse.

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