Hi :)
I thought most people disabled things such as the autorecovery and
did their own saves at a time of their own choosing.� It's so
annoying so finally be in mid-flow and then have to wait for the save
to finish before continuing and then losing inspiration by the time
it's done.�
A long time ago people started trying to save all the screen-shots in
a separate folder.� Even easier to unzip the odt and extract the
"images" folder and keep that safely separate as insurance against
the day of image loss.�
I would rather see someone add a further comment to the instructions
to tell people to save their own work every half hour or so rather
than risk all the problems we had before.�
The bug was not "a" bug.� There seemed to be many different
combinations of events that would lead to losing images.� I vaguely
remember people here spending ages tracking down 1 specific case but
it was difficult to disentangle different combinations of
circumstances.� I vaguely remember that 1 combination leading to 1
bug getting fixed but people still finding occasional problems.�
One hope is that as the code is de-spaghettied, as comments are
removed or translated, as streamlining continues, as chunks written
in odd languages are translated into C++ or whatever instead of Java
and a mix of other things, that as these sorts of things are being
done a lot of the problems drop out or get found&fixed as part of
the process or just identified more easily.� The allegation in the
docs team a couple of years ago was that this problem had been around
since OOo 2.x and that despite a lot of time being put into
pinpointing it since then the problem had never been fully solved.�
At least 1 case of the problem seemed to be that if someone else had
been working with auto-saves on then the problem would happen later
on, perhaps to someone that was taking elaborate precautions.�
Given that those screen-shots would be really useful in other forms
of documentation, such as the in-built help, perhaps the wiki,
perhaps as stills in videos, perhaps in HowTo guides, blogs and
elsewhere i think it would be really great if people could reach into
the zip of the odt and create a copy of the images folder.� I think
best to not worry about the messed-up name of the images in there.
Leave that to someone else to sort out.�
Murphy's Law suggests that the only time you wont experience a
particular difficulty is when you take elaborate precautions against
it.�
On the other hand we used to get a lot of questions about the issue
on the Users List and now we get hardly any but i get the feeling
that might partly be due to people using AskLO or the forums or other
places instead of always going to the Users List nowadays.�
It is gutting to lose so much work but i thought most computer users
were used to the idea of saving and creating a spare copy (backup
copy) as part of their "going to get a cuppa tea/coffee" routine.
Also i tend to find that however long it took first time i can
generally do it a lot faster 2nd time around after i lose work.
Decisions that were agonised over or researched are taken in moments
2nd time around. Regards from Tom :)�
