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.
While I can understand you wanting autosave on in your situation, I much prefer autosave off because I often open files to see what is in them and do not want to automatically modify them just because I accidentally hit a key and delete it. Automatically changing stuff is a choice you should have to make, not a feature that I have to race to disable.
The most mildly infuriating thing about this post is a parent not letting a child do their own work because they would do it slowly. I've read all the responses, clearly OP is not willing to reflect on what others are telling him. I just feel sorry for the child whose peers are getting practice in basic life skills that she won't have the opportunity to because her dad thinks he knows better than her teachers and the curriculum. His own ego is so wrapped up in his child writing a good essay and showing 'critical thinking' that he's not letting her do her own work. He admits to cheating. Just a wretched situation that I hope turns around when another adult steps in or his child gets old enough to tell him to back off.
On the other hand.. consider if your cat had walked over the keyboard before it rebooted and replaced it all with hhhhgggggggggggggggggggghgf before it auto saved and replaced the document. Would you still be an advocate for auto save?
It sucks to lose work, but this is clearly a user error.
I wouldn’t have learned to type if a teacher hadn’t lied to me and told me that I wouldn’t be allowed to go to high school unless I could pass a basic typing test. It enraged me at the time when I found out, but it was one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me in the long run.
My mom was like you, well intentioned and getting involved a lot, to my detriment. I’ve never been able to get across to her that I would have been better off as an adult if I’d been allowed to struggle and accept consequences more as a kid. This became extremely apparent to me when I went to boarding school as an older teen, and had to catch up fast to my more self reliant peers. Getting away from people going overboard to help me was the best thing that ever happened to me, and I watched the same pattern play out with a lot of other students who had overly loving parents. The road to hell can be paved with good intentions.
Typing things for your kid is like reading things for your kid—it is such a fundamental skill that not being forced to reach your potential in it will massively change your life for the worse. My mom was a teacher for over 20 years, and the three biggest factors in success were reading ability, reading comprehension, and typing (as the modern form of writing). None of those skills are going to be obtained with anything other than exposure, practice, and time. You can give someone tools for practicing, but you can’t do the practicing for them.
I saw in your comments that your daughter has a learning disability, but all of this still stands. She will be judged against her peers as an adult, regardless of her diagnosis, so it’s best to start finding ways to work with it now.
Learn to save often. Sometimes that means 5x in a row just to be sure.
Never just assume the software is going to save you from yourself. Its OK to trust software, but you gotta make sure it does what you expect it to do. In this case, that means either checking those settings when you start out, or making sure the file exists on disk.
Invest in some typing games for your kid so they learn how to type properly and can do their own work! I understand wanting to help your kid succeed, but you can't do that in the long term without crippling their development.
The responses have classic “I run Arch” energy. It’s never the fault of the software. It’s always the fault of the user. Ignore them. This is terrible UX and should be criticised. She did absolutely nothing wrong.
This thread is absolutely terrible. I’m very sorry op. As a software dev, I think I’ve hit the save button maybe ten times in the past 2 years. You are right that it should auto save by default. That’s just required in this day and age. People saying they don’t want auto save because they don’t want cats losing their work literally do not understand how auto save works in the vast majority of modern systems. A simple example is Google sheets, where you can literally see every change made to every character in every file throughout time. You’re not going to lose anything. Software devs solved this in their own tools literally decades ago. My job is literally editing text files all day long. I can’t remember the last time I lost data due to a crash or a cat or anything.
Some people even mention LaTeX which literally has a solution with Overleaf. If software doesn’t autosave in this day and age, it’s shit software.
What you have here is another case of Linux users jumping to defend the only things they have to defend, even if it’s absolute shit.
First of all, as a time honored tradition it is customary to say this: Never, ever trust an autosave. Manual saves and backup, always.
With that out of the way, yeah, libre office is kinda bad at the regular user stuff. If you aren't a fiddler who goes through options first and sets their own personal preferences, a bad time will be had.
Also, apparently crashes might reset the auto save tick depending on the version used, so check twice if it happens again just to make sure.
Ps: Never had an issue with it personally, but it's hit or miss with its users.
Having cut my teeth on MS-DOS 3.0 in a 4.77MHz PC with a monochrome monitor, two floppy drives and no hard disk, it was drilled into me early to save, save, save. It's just muscle memory for me now.
Writing a whole paper without saving is unimaginable to me.
First thing you teach someone who is going to use a computer, is to save the document every 4 minutes. Who knows when the power will go out... But I am sorry for her essay, and thanks for telling me that autosave feature is disabled by default. I would have never known.
Autosave should always be seen as a back up option that covers unexpected closes or whatever. It shouldn’t really be a thing to rely on as the main option.
You never have to worry about a document saving if you make sure it’s actually saved by manually saving before closing.
I type things in for her because she’s a really bad typist, but she tells me what to write…
At the risk of being that asshole who tells a parent how to raise their child based off a single post online, how do you expect her to become a better typist if you do it for her? She's 13, she's probably not gonna be that good at anything, she's at the age where she's supposed to be learning things (and that includes skills like typing).
Maybe I'm just projecting my own parents' shortcomings onto you, but they often just did things for me instead of helping me learn. I think I would be a better, more well-rounded human today if they had pushed me to be a bit more independent. I'm sure you're doing this out of love for your daughter, but I think you might not be doing her any favours by doing a portion of the work yourself. If she decides to pursue post-secondary education, are you still going to type her essays for her? What about if she gets a job that involves typing?
I work as a video editor. I have premiere pro/after effects autosave every 15 minutes but I always manually save every major changes that I make. It's automatic to me. Ctrl+s, Ctrl+s, Ctrl+s
I support Office365 in an education environment and you wouldn't believe the number of documents lost to autosave. Autosave and document recovery are definitely nice and useful to have, but they're not infallible. Shit happens and when it does, it's when you're finishing up your midterm the night before it's due.
You need to save, and save often. And if the project you're working on is "super important it's 50% of my grade" make backups. Even just saving a copy to a flash drive is better than nothing.
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.
Ok hear me out, what I'm gonna say is probably not the thing most people would like to hear but here I go:
To write things down, I use ghostwriter and it does have autosave feature. Sure, it's just a markdown writer however it's great for distraction-free writing too. You can just use ghostwriter to write things and if you still need it in an office document, you can copy-paste it into LibreOffice.
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.
The amount of times I've fucked up my template documents for forms and had to go back and revert them because they were autosaving and I hadn't set them to read only makes me not a huge fan of autosave being on automatically. Is the problem easily solvable? Yes. Have I somehow still not gotten used to autosave even though it's the norm for like a decade at least? Also, yes. But there it is. A reason why for you.
10fastfingers.com for your daughter. Or any of the hundreds of other games and tests and practice tools. Being able to type well is an important skill in this life that she'll need.
On auto save: it should be a trivial option that's always on and always reliably saves -multiple- copies of your work
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.
Manual save made sense when a disk write froze the program for seconds and engaged the disk drive with sounds (which I miss a little; very reassuring) but today autosave ought to be fully expected. LibreOffice really should've had it on by default.
At work i use a $800 proprietary shit software that has a 70% chance of crashing when printing (so it crashes when job is done)
So I got used to Ctrl+S every. Single. Sentence.
Windows 10 home loves to automatically reboot to install the fucking updates IMMEDIATELY. RIGHT. NOW. And Microsoft pushed some big update just a few days ago. When LibreOffice crashes usually there's a recovery feature. It's windows. Windows wanted to install the fucking updates and it told LibreOffice to gracefully close RIGHT NOW, and NO, THE USER DOESN'T WANT TO SAVE, the user wants to get updates immediately ASAP
Btw automatically saving is a generally undesirable feature as it could reduce the lifetime of ssds, slowdown the system if the file Is big or stored on slow media like network.
Some weeks ago I wrote my probabilities homework on LaTeX, every couple of lines I press F5 to compile and see how it was looking. I was pretty sure that compiling automatically saved the project, but I was wrong and lost and entire night of LaTeX work. Now I know that I need to manually save first, after that compiling save the project and the compiled pdf when F5.
Even if its on by default, first thing you should do when installing or first using it is adjust the settings imo. How often is still a matter of personal choice. And other settings are as well. Granted, I get I'm probably far from the average given how much I like to tinker with settings and customizing toolbars, etc. Still agree it should be on by default along with some basic version history to undo unwanted autosaves.
Sorry you forgot to save but I don't see how this is the fault of the libreoffice community. I also think cheating isn't the right answer at all but that's not really my place.
Maybe you should do a hardware test as it is really not normal for devices to just reboot. I would start with a RAM test then move on to a stress test for a few hours.
you are old enough to have kids, you should be old enough to know to press ctrl-s frequently.
I'm okay with that cheating since I know she worked hard on it.
This is a horrible character trait to pass on to a kid. You are saying that because she worked hard she deserves a good grade regardless of how she gets the good grade. That’s not how education or the real world works. You are raising a monster.
There are so many red flags here. She should be learning to type faster. The modern world requires typing your own work. She may very well be typing slowly on purpose so you will do it for her. I suggest this because I used to do it to my parents until they saw me typing fast while playing computer game.
You should have used this as a teaching moment. Sometimes you screw up, make a mistake, and have to redo your work from scratch.
You won’t take this advice or the advice from any other comment here. I wish you and your child the best of luck, but this situation is absolutely rife with bad decisions.
LMAO blaming the software because you're too dumb to hit Ctrl + s. Presumably you're old enough to have been taught to save often. Now maybe your daughter will learn from your fuck up and actually SAVE HER WORK.
Also she's never going to learn to type well if you just do it for her. Get her Mavis Beacon for Christmas this year and stop doing her homework for her.
I had a similar problem. I had made a bunch of changes to a document and just closed LibreOffice Calc thinking it would prompt me to save it. It did not. It just exited and discarded my changes. I went in that day and turned on AutoSave.
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.
This is why I rather use something like Google docs, even though I’m not a fan of Google, it saves automatically and has a version history I can revert to.
I guess it's about what one's used to. I'd be pretty annoyed if it started overwriting my documents when I when I do not explicitly tell it to do that.
I copy something from the document, maybe hit cut instead of copy. Now it's gone from the original.
That could be a great learning experience. If it's an important document not only do I save regularily, I also create copies of the file at regular intervals.
Yeah, foss softwares are full of these 'design flaws' for some reason. Take for exemple the 'single click to open files' that was the default on KDE for so long despite everyone reverting it back to double click.