Good point, I didn’t think of that as normally saving the file in its location and under a desired name is one of the first things I do.

But Word doesn’t auto-save when you open a blank document and start typing. And that’s how most people start their work.

Also, I knew people who would habitually disable the auto-save feature because it was “hurting their productivity” – he was annoyed that Word would usually skip a beat while Auto-saving (he had an old, slow computer) and he considered that an interruption.

Users will always find ways to circumvent the measures we devise to protect them.

I agree with jambarama…Word 2007 autosaves info every 10 minutes by default I believe. So if developers do more work up front if will save these people’s lives as we all know that most of them will never change. :(

This is an easy fix – us coders can protect our users. OO.org has autosave, and Google docs autosaves too. MS Office has an option for it, and there is no good reason it shouldn’t be on by default. OO.org 3 is going to have revision control built in too, google docs already does. Lots of games have autosave, or save points that are hard to miss. There is no reason autosave shouldn’t be built into every app.

Also, forgot to add… Just noticed as I sent the post…
Whenever I need to send some chunk of text through the browser to a server, I put the text in the clipboard, in case the sending fails.

Hmm, I save frequently… Think it’s a thing I learned from programming…
Even when word processing I have almost after every word. I sort of unconsciously hit ctrl-s when working in OO Writer. Sometimes I’m on a ‘writing spree’ and maybe skip saving for several sentences, but that’s exeptions. When in vim it’s sort of a habit to : w i

When programming, I also save different versions whenever I’ve made a working change, to be able to roll back to a previous version if it fucks up.

I will check it out, thanks for the tip.

My thing with VSS is that the company I worked at used it so I was kinda forced into that and never really looked for alternatives or ways to export the data.

@un4scene – yes, people like your boss totally perplex me. Especially since Windows actually keeps that information for you in the file system. Each file has creation date and last modification date associated with it.

Also, MS Word has a versioning feature since Office 2000 if I remember correctly. I think you can enable it under File Properties – then every time you save, it basically takes a snapshot of the current document state – and you can roll back to any previous version at any time.

I can see how sometimes putting the date in the filename would make sense, but I never cease to be amazed how far are people willing to go to shoot themselves in the foot with thechnology. :P

@Aaron – I save especially often when working with graphics. Cause it is usually easier to retype a paragraph than the recreate that cool effect you spent last 20 minutes making in gimp/photoshop.

@Ricardo – LOL

Also, I’m a subversion guy myself, but I guess it’s all a matter of taste and habit. :) I must say though that Tortoise SVN client is an impressive piece of software in the way it seamlessly integrates with explorer and how easy and intuitive it is to use. I went through dozen linux or cross-platform Subversion clients and I have yet to find one that would allow me to do in KDE what I do in Windows with Tortoise. It’s trully bizarre that my favorite svn client is windows based. :P

This reminds me of an old neighbor that one day screamed so loud that I though, hearing from my flat, that someone was dying or something. When I arrived there, he had lost a whole night of work. He hadn’t slept at all and had to deliver the report on that same morning.

my important documents are usually under some sort of version control but that’s a whole different story.

I also do that!! Most of my documents that are bigger than a blog post I tend to store at CVS or VSS.

The only time I don’t click save constantly is when doing graphics. I got used Gimp’s stability on Linux, so sometimes I won’t save for hours. In Gimp this has only bit me two or three times, and not hard enough for me to learn my lesson, but when I started using Inkscape on my old laptop, I had to try to break the habit because sometimes it would bring the whole system to a halt.