GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 154316
Auto-Save should save a backup copy and be enabled by default.
Last modified: 2007-11-06 19:51:12 UTC
Open gnumeric; work for a while; encounter a bug that causes Gnumeric to die unexpectedly. If you've forgotten to save, you will lose your data (this just happened to me, destroying several hours of work). To me, this seems to violate a core GNOME HIG principle: forgive user mistakes (http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/usabilityprinciples.html#forgive-the-user) The best solution within Gnumeric as it currently exists is to enable auto-save (which I have now done). However, this is not enabled by default, probably because it makes it possible to accidentally auto-save over old work (which is also a vioaltion of the forgive-the-user principle). The way to avoid the accidental auto-save is to ask to be prompted each time Gnumeric auto-saves, but this makes auto-save into a constant annoyance and forces the user to choose between being annoyed and being backed up. The ideal behavior would be to have an emacs-style backup system: user data is backed up, but user work is not saved over unless the user explicitly saves. When starting Gnumeric after a crash, the user should be presented with a dialog explaining that an auto-saved version of the work exists and offering to recover lost work (ideally it will show the time difference between the auto-saved version and the last saved version; better still would be to allow the user to see the differences between the versions). I don't know whether to categorize this as a severe bug (since it causes lost user work), an enhancement (since it is a new features), or an HIG-violation bug. From google searches, I see that in 2002, there was a patch creating a new version of auto-save (http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnumeric-list/2002-February/msg00057.html). I don't know why this didn't make it into mainstream code. It seems to me a new solution to autosave is necessary to bring Gnumeric into HIG compliance.
You can safely leave the categorization to us. This is not a HIG issue -- the thing that causes data loss is the crasher bug. The old saver could use a large amount of memory -- that was the reason we turned it off. With the new sax-saver we might be able to turn this on. I am guessing that we should just save to a different filename.
I think saving to a different filename would be an improvement, even if the default behavior is still not to have autosave on (although perhaps a better solution would be to check the file-size and then disable/slow-down autosave when necessary). And hopefully the new saver will provide a way to turn auto-save on from the start. I'll file a bug report if I figure out what it was that crashed Gnumeric in the first place -- it's hard to track a bug that causes an instant close, since you can't look at what you've done (I believe the crash had to do with a poorly formed formula of some kind). In addition to the comment I referenced, I notice that the comment here (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64637#c9) repeats what I've mentioned here -- and the replies suggest some of the reasons autosave has yet to be implemented (which you've repeated here).
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 64637 ***