A coworker just panicked that Auto Save had nuked hours of work. Fortunately, OneDrive had a backup version, so only a few minutes were lost. Lesson learned: When you’re trying to fork a file into two separate versions, make a copy first before making any changes to either.
Realistically though, when was the last time Auto Save actually saved the day? Usually, it just causes you to scream in terror as it saves your files at the exact wrong moment. Imagine opening a massive Excel file made by someone else. You make a few modifications to see how the calculation works with your numbers. You got the information you wanted, so you close the file without saving… but did you really? A day later, the coworker asks you why you had to ruin that calculation completely. Yeah, you can’t really discard the changes when everything is saved automatically, now can you?
It feels like discarding the changes made all shared files really safe, since your screw-ups were never permanent. Now they are. Every time you open a file, you have to be extra cautious not to accidentally delete or change anything. With Word files it’s even worse. Move one image by accidentally dragging it, and the entire layout gets randomised. Auto Save seems to cause far more anxiety than it prevents.
Im not sure in what context you’re talking about. In most document software you just do control+z and you get back to where you were. And most software that has some sort of autosave feature keeps a timeline. Idk, I’ve never had this problem.
In this case someone had a long file that was supposed to be split into two. They deleted some stuff and saved a new version. As a result, they got two files with the same stuff deleted. Auto save overwrote the original file that was supposed to remain untouched.
And undo didn’t work?
How can it cause problems this often? It is the opposite for me - autosave saves my ass more often than not.
Undo works when the app is open. If it’s closed and restarted, there’s nothing to undo. Anyway, you clearly use these applications in a less hazardous manner.
Why are you closing the app when the file is in a bad state? Undo first… There’s so much to unpack here about the way you and your coworkers are using Word where you have so much chance of losing stuff.
In any case, I haven’t tried doing this, but usually there is an auto-save toggle so you can turn it off if it really doesn’t work for you.
Yes, that button exists. Only very few people seem to know about it though. Listening to my coworker’s frustrations makes me learn all sorts of interesting things about the way they use computers. Let’s just say that it’s usually surprising and amazing.
Copy first, then do the change?
Exactly. That’s what you’re supposed to do, but people don’t. That’s why auto save ends up ruining more days than it saves.
An analogy is somebody writing a letter, erasing half of the letter, then scanning it and be surprised you now have two half letters.
If anything, auto-saving should be more intuitive.
I guess it isn’t intuitive to people who are used to saving manually or discarding unwanted changes many times every day.