I use DTPO to keep a weekly journal of my activities at work (along with organizing documents). A few days ago, my computer rebooted, and I lost several days worth of notes. I don’t consider this very user-friendly. Text editors like ‘vi’ and ‘emacs’ preserve my changes, although they require the user to use an “recover” mode to restore a saved version. Searching the preferences, DT’s help, and the forums don’t show any way to configure autosave.
One posting suggested that users “get in the habit of typing S periodically”. Programs like DT are supposed to make my life more convenient. I shouldn’t have to train myself to save my document - there should be an option to autosave.
The issue of AutoSave for DT has been discussed since at least Nov 2007. I think your users would really appreciate Devon Tech adding an autosave option to DT.
Losing data is unfortunate. DEVONthink doesn’t have autosave, which I agree would be good as would versioning.
Were the notes opened into their own windows? In this case, a crash will cause lost edits – as you described. However, even in the absence of autosave, there is a use case where notes are actually saved. If you are using a view like three panes view, and you are editing notes in the document viewport (lower right pane), then notes are saved when you switch the focus to another document or tab – even if the red “close” button has the black “unsaved” (“dirty”) indicator displayed. In this case, you should be at risk of losing only one note’s most recent edits if there is a crash.
After losing a bit of data after a DT crash, and reading this thread, and this one too: Crashes and solutions
I was wondering if the devs have had any further thoughts about adding some kind of autosave, or about leveraging OS X’s own versioning?
As an added benefit, autosaving would also mean less save dialogs popping up for users working in unsaved documents, clicking hyperlinks to other documents in DT…
Thanks, that’s excellent news. In the meantime I’ve been using Keyboard Maestro to automatically execute “Save All” command in the Data menu every few minutes.
Please tell me that there is an Autosave option hiding somewhere that I have not yet found. Surely this has now been implemented?
Perhaps in 2007 a lack of Autosave was tolerable. But in 2016, we are all habituated to note taking apps, collaboration tools and even word processing software (e.g. Google Docs) that automatically save our text, and also have robust undo / versioning and recovery tools to allow us to restore content accidentally overwritten.
If there are still enough old-school DT users around who need control over exactly when things are saved, well fair enough - make it an option. But please implement Autosave and turn it on by default when first installed by a new user. Or if that is really really not possible, please find a way to make it clear to new users that your notes are not actually saved until you click Save.
In my transition period I have lost countless notes which I thought were saved but still open I guess (the database apparently locked somehow, tried to open it, it wouldn’t let me, had to force a re-open… all those first notes are gone).
And now I am valiantly trying to remember to Ctrl+S all my changes, but still continue to lose segments of my text. The latest chunk of work disappeared thus: I was editing a rich text note in its own window. I noticed in the Group listing (open in the separate 3-pane window) that the note did not have a meaningful name. I haven’t worked out how to edit the title of a note in its own window, so clicked into the listing to double click the title and edit the name… oh, formatting change is needed, format the text to consistent font) - and where are my latest changes?! Gone?!
This application just makes it way too easy to lose stuff. Please please address this!
I am really trying hard to get on with this product. But this is really disappointing. The lack of this functionality (something that most people would take for granted) is very surprising.