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.
Libreoffice will likely still work fine for you, especially now that you’ve got autosave turned on. Heck, I have faculty that refuse to use anything other than LibreOffice, so I have it installed in our computer labs. As long as you’re saving and backing up reasonably often, you should be good to go. Though your school likely has a cloud suite that you could use too. Office365 and Google Workspaces are by far the most popular. It would be integrated with your daughter’s student email which I can’t imagine a modern school not having. If you’re not sure, contact the school and they’d be able to help you.
I’m sorry your kid lost her paper! It’s always a bummer to take a call and it’s a kid crying because their paper went up in smoke. If you haven’t already, contact the teacher and let them know what happened. IME most teachers are reasonable and as long as “office ate my homework” isn’t your go-to excuse, they’ll give you an extension.
I appreciate it, thanks. It’s all been sorted out now, so we can just move on and we’ve both learned a lesson.