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.

  • eric
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    4610 months ago

    I think your memory might be failing on this, because we’re about the same age and autosave wasn’t really a common feature in the 90s. MacOS didn’t introduce autosave until OSX Lion in 2010, and Microsoft’s auto-recover (which was their only feature even close to autosave until office365) wasn’t introduced until the 2000s and didn’t work properly until 2007.

    • Flying SquidOP
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      1210 months ago

      Fair. I could very well be misremembering. I don’t have the greatest memory.

      • @[email protected]
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        3610 months ago

        I don’t have the greatest memory.

        You should have hit Ctrl + S more throughout life.

          • @[email protected]
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            310 months ago

            It does for me, but I’m autistic.

            I can literally decide “I’m gonna remember this thing” and then push it into my brain in a way that I know it’ll be there forever.

      • eric
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        410 months ago

        It happens to me more and more these days as well.