Comment by virgil_disgr4ce
7 days ago
It's amazing that the world has largely forgotten the terror of losing entire documents forever. It happened to me. It happened to everyone. And this is the only comment I've seen so far here to even mention this.
Bad old days indeed!
Indeed, but it was pretty easy to develop the habit of hitting whatever function key was bound to "Save" fairly frequently. I certainly did.
Also auto-save is a mixed bag. With manual save, I was free to start editing a document and then realize I want to save it as something else, or just throw away my changes and start over. With auto-save, I've already modified my original. It took me quite a while to adjust to that.
If your program's auto-save works like that, it's broken.
Almost none do, though. Auto-save almost always writes to a temporary file, that is erased when you save manually.
Google Docs and VS Code are the first two that come to mind for autosave and they don't use a temp file.
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I still occasionally make that auto-save mistake.
AI tools have caused me to trip up a few times too when I fail to notice how many changes haven’t been checked into git, and then the tool obliterates some of its work and a struggle ensues to partially revert (there are ways, both in git and in AI temporary files etc). It’s user error but it is also a new kind of occasional mistake I have to adapt to avoid. As with when auto-save started to become universal.