Save Every Thirty Seconds

I just noticed that when I work with any piece of software that involves editing a document, I save every thirty seconds or better.

I have done programming professionally for five years and am now writing course material to train other would-be programming professionals. Even though I am not writing much code on the job these days, I just noticed that I lean on Ctrl+S, even when I'm using Microsoft PowerPoint!

I look at the "auto save" feature of the Microsoft Office products, which measure mean time between "save" in minutes, and I can't believe it. Are there truly people out there who work on a document for ten or twenty minutes at a time without saving it? You would think that with so much more important information stored in computer-processed documents, that those people would have had at least one horrifying experience -- you know, losing an hour's work -- that they would come to rely heavily on the save action.

What other experiences do people have out there?

-- JbRainsberger

I once had to help an economy assistant to retrieve an Excel sheet lost in a Windows crash. She had been working non-stop without saving from early morning, only to find a crashed computer when she returned from lunch. Most people have experience with crashes and unstable software, but they don't always associate this with the risk of losing data.

For me, the little "star" on a modified file's name shines as bright as the sun.

-- AndersBengtsson

"I just noticed that I lean on Ctrl+S..." That MuscleMemory can cause you grief when you're working on something via telnet. "Why did my screen just freeze? Oh...Ctrl+Q"

Yes, I have had that happen. Sometimes it takes several minutes for me to adjust my habits when I'm in an unusual environment, such as a remote session. I find, though, that it only takes those few minutes, then I am running at full speed in that environment. Strange: I seem to adapt quickly, even though I'm generally not a fan of change. -- JbRainsberger

I only save once I've made a significant change in a document. If the program crashes, it's not much of a loss. I'll usually just retype it, and often, it will be better than what I did in the first place. Also, autosaving every 30 seconds doesn't work well if say, you are editing a 100MB file. -- BlakeMason

Doing something that causes CRTL-X/CTRL-S to do something other than save illustrates just how often I save while using Emacs. Roughly once every ten characters.

This would not be an issue if Windows software wasn't so confused by that. Thank goodness Word ignores the C-X and saves on the C-S.... although of course it does then take it 30 seconds to do the save...

--KatieLucas

I would really like to have Eclipse's "Local History" feature in every document-processing program I use. In fact, I'd just like it to be part of the operating system. Storage is cheap, so why not? -- JbRainsberger

Use VMS. Every file has history. You can configure the depth you like. This is one of the features I wish DaveCutler would have added to Windows NT. -- EricHodges

When editing wiki pages, I'm often befuddled by a "Save As" dialogue box popping up out of nowhere. :-) -- ElizabethWiethoff

See SaveOften