Weird feeling while working on a document – anyone else?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’m curious if I am the only person on the globe who experiences this feeling.

When creating or changing any sort of document on a computer, I am continually aware of the need to Save it. I don’t think I click Save more than typical – that’s not what I’m referring to. What I’m talking about is that there is a very mild, but very present, gnawing feeling in the back of my mind that it’s been a minute since I’ve last saved. Once I click Save (or CTRL S), there comes a brief moment of (again, very mild) sense of relaxation. Of course, it starts ramping up again pretty soon until the next save. The pattern obviously repeats throughout the time that I am working on that document.

I expect several “WTF are you on about?” replies and wonder if I will get even a single “me too!”

mmm

2

I constantly save my work after every important input. Been bitten too many times by not having done so. And I make back up revisions daily in case I change my mind on something later.

3

Of course you should save your work, but various editors I use do seem to be able to recover from a crashed session, so you may want to make sure that functionality is activated in whatever you are using.

4

Sure, there’s nothing unusual about the basic concept of Save anxiety. The degree you’re describing may be unusual.

I got my anxiety from my days working with CorelDraw on an under-powered 386, with Corel – or Windows 3.0 itself – crashing frequently. But my corporate laptop still gets about one blue screen per month, and there are many other ways I can lose my work.

You may want to start working with Google Docs, where every keystroke is saved immediately to the Cloud. (In fact, someone has figured out how to play back those keystrokes later on.)

Similarly, Microsoft Word and Excel offer an “autosave” option when working with documents stored on OneDrive. Like Google Docs, it also keeps older copies of your document. Autosave/OneDrive has changed my attitude towards working with Word and Excel.

But sometimes it can have consequences : someone shares an Excel document with you using OneDrive, you open it, forget to turn off autosave, widen column C to see a detail, add a column to include your 30% markup next to their wholesale prices, and those changes are recorded immediately in their original document.

5

Yes, like @Si_Amigo, I’ve been burned enough times that I tend to hit save a lot as well.

If your worrying is happening so often it reaches the point of irrationality, it might be a touch of OCD. Not being flippant here- OCD runs strongly through our family on my dad’s side. It seems to skip generations- both my dad and my son have been clinically diagnosed with it, yet neither I nor my two sisters seem to have it. Though I have noticed latent tendencies in myself. But good news- as long as the tendencies don’t turn into full-blown OCD, it’s less “crippling mental issue” and more just “paying attention to details”.

My sister has described it this way: if you are driving to work, get to the end of your street, wonder if you unplugged the iron, and drive home to check, that’s not OCD. If you do all that, get to the end of your street a second time, and are compelled to go home and check again, that’s OCD.”

6

“Save anxiety”, yeah , that’s a good term.

Although, in my case, “anxiety” is too strong a word. I’m gonna call mine “save awareness”.

And I’m not really looking for a solution, just musing and wondering how widespread this phenomenon is.

mmm

7

Not as widespread as it ought to be. I think that’s probably about the only statement that can safely be made.

8

You wait a minute before you hit save? It’s just one little keystroke or click with the mouse. Why don’t you save every 20 or 30 seconds? Some day you’ll be glad you did.

9

Yes and no.

If it is critical to save every 20 or 30 seconds, the application should do it automatically instead of forcing you to click like a Pavlovian rat instead of focusing on writing/painting/whatever.

One popular editor by default updates the swap file “after typing 200 characters or when you have not typed anything for four seconds”, which seems basically reasonable most of the time.

10

Some of us derive pleasure from Pavlovian responses to stimuli.

11

Not sure if you are serious.

“It’s been a minute” is just an expression.

mmm

12

I’m pretty sure that Microsoft Word and Excel had an autosave option before cloud storage was a thing.

13

I frequently save, out of habit.

I also hit the Esc key three or four times (in rapid succession) when I want to deselect something or fix something.

14

I hit command S every few seconds.

15

Me, too. Anyone with any amount of computer experience will have learned the hard way to do this, either reflexively or by setting up auto-save.

Losing text that you’ve worked on for many minutes or hours is one the most aggravating experiences there is. And 99% unnecessary. (Allowing for Acts of God.)

16

I also tend to save a lot when working on computer documents. I use AutoCAD/Civil 3D a lot at work and I save all the time (it’s a quick keyboard command in that program) 'cause the ramifications of losing even 15 minutes of work can be pretty significant. I also save back-up copies of the CAD files 'cause going from point B back to point A (if I don’t like the linework I’ve developed) can be difficult if I don’t have a backup copy to go to. I don’t generally go to that extent for MS Office documents, though.

17

I used to, because I got burned very badly back in college, in the early days of computer-based term papers. (Fat Mac 512ke with System 3 on a floppy disk).

I’ve mostlly lost that “I gotta save my work” impulse, for three reasons:

a) FileMaker Pro — I’m in FileMaker a lot whenever I’m on a computer, and it commits records (i.e., saves the data) the moment you click or tab out of the field. You never have to save your work except when you’re modifying scripts.

b) Web browsers — Like everyone else, I spend a lot of my unpaid downtime and self-entertainment on web sites. Don’t have to Command-S or click a save icon very much in a web browser.

c) Text Editor & Word Processor — the modern MacOS in conjunction with the autosave features of these modern programs means that if I crash or voluntarily reboot, everything comes back up and opens its windows exactly where they were before, even unsaved / untitled notes to myself.

18

Exactly. I try to pound that into some people’s heads at work. A few don’t listen and I tell them I don’t want to hear it when you lose a file.

19

You can customize your autosave intervals in Options. However, some projects I work on have huge aerial mosaics or extremely complex surfaces; so often my 10-minute autosave interval would mean “ten minutes of work time followed 5 minutes of waiting for the autosave process to complete”… which inevitably means sometimes I have to disable autosaving in order to work semi-efficiently. Which also means, the next time I work on a project where autosave would be perfectly fine, I’ll have some sort of crash/hangup and lose literal hours of work, because I forgot to re-enable it…

20

I used to be a save junkie, but everything auto-saves now. My Notepad++ session has unsaved files that are years old, have persisted through OS updates, countless reboots and crashes, and so on.

The loss from an uncommanded reboot now lies entirely in losing the “session” of stuff that I’d been working on. Any project I do requires multiple programs: editors, IDEs, command windows, opened folders, browser tabs, and so on. These do not get perfectly restored on a reboot, and might require 30+ minutes to get everything brought back the way I like.

I do still get save anxiety in video games. F5 before any major encounter at the least. And since they have no sophisticated save management features, I have to come up with my own, having multiple rotations of save files over different timeframes in case I need to go back to something much earlier.