Edit: And more generally, DOS, FAT and CHKDSK.
You never knew, when there was a power interruption -- or when the system just crashed for whatever mysterious reason -- just how bad it would be. NTFS was such an improvement.
Also the habit of saving multiple copies, as a revision history. Because Word occasionally wrote garbage to files, while crashing.
[2] https://orgmode.org/manual/Exporting.html#Exporting
[3] http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/orgmode-wordprocess...
But if it's local, what's the advantage vs saving as a file? Simple revision history management?
I use git for any important private projects, and don't often use it online.
For some long lived documents I keep a "release branch" and make branches for playing around. If a direction or section isn't fruitful I can leave it on a branch without fear of losing "something good", and go back to mainline. I can also tag shared/published versions easily.
Oh and push a backup to another machine easily or automatically.
I also have the habit of pressing it more than one time, every time I press it.
I'm not even be sure that save will really save.
My kids are getting to the age where they are doing projects on a computer and I'm constantly telling them to "save early, save often."
I guess it's some form of PTSD from computing in the 90's.
I got the same advice from my grandfather, who grew up in the Great Depression. I think it was PTSD on his part, too.
And my reaction was: how do you forget to save? That's muscle memory for me, man! Command-S gets hit five times in as many minutes.
With the right tools - an IDE with version control - the quaint notion of saving files can be mostly forgotten and the fear of losing unsaved work banished. Even if over 30 adaptation is possible so long as it is an easy, downhill path with less to do instead of new stuff to learn.
It used to be 'Jesus saves' but now, for me, my motto is to just use an IDE.
3 hours later...
Now, I save whenever I am happy with a single edit.
The teacher recommended at the beginning of the exam to save often, especially before running our programs, because if they got stuck, we would have to reboot, losing everything.
Of course, there was still a guy that typed for a whole hour without saving. Upon running his program, it obviously crashed and he lost all his work.
I got the habit of saving constantly pressing ctrl-s ever since. I do it even in apps that don't save anything, getting annoying sounds from my computer.
I even have a script to delete all HTML in my Download folder.
I also find myself hitting ctrl-s in Firefox in an online ERP system we use when I really need to find and hit an Export To... button. I sit there for about two seconds staring at the Save As dialog wondering where it came from.
Been using this system for over two years now but I still find myself doing it at least once a week.
Cloud and mobile apps are often very good at taking this task away from a user, but it's worth remembering to take responsibility for saving/backing up files that have value.
Even clouds can get blown away some times.
But then again I don't think it was more than a month ago that some coworker lost work because Photo Shop crashed and they hadn't saved in a while.
I still do it reflexively after every significant change.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...
"Microsoft hopes that XENIX will become the preferred choice for software production and exchange", the company stated in 1981.[8] Microsoft referred to its own MS-DOS as its "single-user, single-tasking operating system",[31] and advised customers that wanted multiuser or multitasking support to buy XENIX.[31][32] It planned to over time improve MS-DOS so it would be almost indistinguishable from single-user XENIX, or XEDOS, which would also run on the 68000, Z8000, and LSI-11; they would be upwardly compatible with XENIX, which BYTE in 1983 described as "the multi-user MS-DOS of the future".[33][34] Microsoft's Chris Larson described MS-DOS 2.0's XENIX compatibility as "the second most important feature".[35] His company advertised DOS and XENIX together, listing the shared features of its "single-user OS" and "the multi-user, multi-tasking, UNIX-derived operating system", and promising easy porting between them.
AT&T started selling System V,[37] however, after the breakup of the Bell System. Microsoft, believing that it could not compete with UNIX's developer, decided to abandon XENIX. The decision was not immediately transparent, which led to the term vaporware.[38] It agreed with IBM to develop OS/2,[4] and the XENIX team (together with the best MS-DOS developers)[citation needed] was assigned to that project. In 1987, Microsoft transferred ownership of XENIX to SCO in an agreement that left Microsoft owning slightly less than 20% of SCO (this amount prevented both companies from having to disclose the exact amount in the event of a SCO IPO). When Microsoft eventually lost interest[clarification needed] in OS/2 as well, the company based its further high-end strategy on Windows NT."
As I vaguely recall, it typically went like this. You're editing some document. Something bad happens, and the system goes down. You reboot, and get the CHKDSK prompt. If you cancel out, sometimes your document is corrupted. If you run CHKDSK, sometimes your document is entirely gone. Unless you've been saving a revision history.