I was wrong about something in my earlier email. I suggested that these
features, including Resume, would be nice to have someday in LO, after
other important bugs and features are dealt with.

I take it back about Resume, because making that work would require
supporting Autosave -- a feature which I am afraid of.

It is my current understanding that Versions only works on HFS+ volumes,
so if an app which autosaves is writing to a FAT32 volume, for instance,
your document gets overwritten every few minutes with the latest
changes, whether you want to keep them or not. Your old versions are
simply lost. Can anyone confirm?

Even when the system works as advertised when saving to HFS+, if you
email a document to a friend for revisions or carry it around on another
storage medium (for example to work on at school), what you get back
will contain only the single, latest version. What do you do with it?
(a) Throw away all the old versions by overwriting the original file?
(b) Remember to change the new file's name and now maintain multiple
files? (c) Port the changes so you have the newest data but can still
believe you could go back to the old?

Keeping multiple files with different names is no different than what we
do now to support separate versions of the same file, but the point is,
Lion encourages the bad option (a) by making saving a no-brainer
process. It trains users NOT to think about what happens to maintain
file data, because saving and autosaving are supposed to always be safe
because you can always go back...a premise that simply is not true.

I have only lost data a few times due to forgetting to save a document,
mostly because of buggy apps which will close without alerting the user
about unsaved data. I'm not afraid of forgetting to save. I'm much more
afraid of making inadvertent changes that then get autosaved, or of
depending upon an old version to be there as promised, but finding it lost.

I hope LO will avoid ever supporting Autosave, and therefore Resume.

--

Charles



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