Save your drafts
This wasn't the original idea for the post for today, but I guess I have to...because some random unexpected software bug nuked my draft of the original post just now.
Photo by Jens Johnsson on Unsplash
It went like this,
I was writing that post in WPS Writer like I used to. It's an unofficial Linux port by the Linux community of the Windows version of the application, and I'm actually pretty glad that it exists. I mean, I can't really complain anything on an office software that works on Linux, looks beautiful to the eyes, have almost perfect compatibility with Microsoft Office's file formats, and is free. Even if it's a word processor that looks like and works like Microsoft Office Word, I still use it for normal Markdown writing because it just looks nice and aesthetics help with idea flows in some way (at least I think so).
Halfway writing, I decided to put it aside and go poke around the software for a while. I haven't really played around it since I installed it and my curiosity doesn't allow that. So, I went and played around in the settings page, leaving my unsaved document in another tab. What could go wrong?
Uh, Murphy's law. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.
After having enough of the settings page (which is actually just a few rows of stuff and there's literally nothing to play with), I decided to close it and...whoosh, the entire thing crashed.
That's unexpected.
Photo by Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash
"Well, there's autosave," I thought and started the thing up again. There's no "restore from autosave" dialogue, and opening a new document gives nothing either. "Royally screwed," I said to myself, feeling a little sad for the 75% completed draft, and a little regret of not saving the thing before. Of course, I cannot expect bugs, but it's an unofficial port and it's brightly labeled in the EULA (or whatever document that is associated) that "THIS PRODUCT COMES WITH NO WARRANTY" or something along that line. Guess I'm just unlucky today for me to meet this then.
So now, I'm writing this in another text editor that I'm used to use. It's my usual code editor, but I gave it a new configuration for it to look good for normal writing. And of course, saving it every a few lines because who knows? It can be a crazily traumatic experience. I guess I'm not too unlucky for this to happen on a post draft, it could happen in an assignment report...well, let's just skip the other worse possibilities then.
Of course, I'm not saying that WPS Office is bad, it's still one of the best free office apps out there available for Linux. Just that I accidentally met a bug and it did something bad...and the harm got amplified just because I didn't make my saves. Ctrl + S isn't that hard to press, make good use of it, everyone.
I guess I'll start to appreciate the autosave features on Steemit, Google Docs, Office Online and other places more from now on then. Can't go wrong with more saves, just in case you need it...just in case. In other places, do your saves manually then :)
I guess that's all for now, see you next time,
--Lilacse
..
*one more save to be safe*
