SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Our office recently updated to a new version of the Office Suite, and it still has an icon in the upper-left corner to perform the 'Save' function. Floppy drives have not been in use for years, and many children would not recognize a 3.5 inch floppy disk on sight. Programs have used this icon for years, because we have yet to find a suitable replacement. The CD/DVD can no longer represent saving, because they have come and gone. Even moving to the more abstract Piggy Bank icon would not work, because they are seldom used in the modern age. A USB Key icon may represent saving in some form, but the may not be around much longer if another medium gains favor. Does this mean that the venerable 3.5 inch Floppy will represent saving information to future generations, or should it be replaced by a different symbol?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @05:00PM
I expect the future is "auto-save" with auto-versioning, similar to VAX/VMS, such that one doesn't have to press a button/icon to save. Saving is an ingrained habit for many of us, but if you think about it, we shouldn't have to explicitly keep asking for saves. Young people may even be able to forget there is a "Save" button in things like word-processors. You wouldn't need one except under rare circumstances. If you are using a memory stick (flash drive) and yank it out too quick, you may have a problem, but if storage copies are automatically done say every 7 seconds, then all you have to do is wait 7 seconds. Or close the document.
But unlike VAX/VMS's way of doing it, older versions may get gradually purged based based on frequency distance. In the background, minor changes or versions may gradually disappear (unless explicitly saved or overridden). The older something is, the less likely you need very specific sub-versions.
For example, 5-minute snapshots may get deleted after 1 day, then 15-minute snapshots deleted after 3 days, hourly snapshots after 1 week, etc. If the disk (storage) is getting full, you may be prompted (warned), and elect more aggressive version purging to continue, with the downside of less-frequent versioning snapshots.
I should point out that things like word-processors may have to change the way they store sections. Each paragraph my have to be treated like a record in a database instead of have one giant RAM image of the document. Otherwise, auto-save could be too disruptive because it's writing a fresh copy of the entire document on every version archive cycle.
In MS-Access there is no need for "save" for "direct" data entry because it uses chunk-based updating. This confuses data entry users at first, but they get used to it and like it. Word-processors and spreadsheets could use similar technology so the auto-versioning is only working on the record level. The risk of reference corruption (bad pointers) perhaps goes up, but full document copies would also be periodically made, similar to copying the .MDB (or .ACCDB) file in MS-Access say every 15 minutes. Thus, if the pointers get fubarred, you have a prior full-document version and lose no more than 15 minutes of work at the most. (Pointers should be checked for orphans or type mismatches by the system on full-doc save to catch any corruption early.)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @05:44PM
I started word processing on a Z-80 CP/M system, with an Emacs/Scribe offshoot called Mince/Scribble, later integrated as FinalWordII then sold to Borland and renamed Sprint. It opened a "swap file" on disk when it started and it was possible to set the time increment for fast incremental saves to the swap file. If something crashed, there was "FWRecover" which could unscramble the swap file (I believe pointers to short chunks of text) and restore the session including multiple editing buffers. Even on old, unreliable hardware, I don't think I ever lost more than a few seconds of typing.
Shutting down and restarting up again put me where I was before, state of editing buffers all saved in the swap file. When I was at a suitable stopping point, then I would "save' to keep a good copy (yes, this was actually "overwrite").
Moving to MS-Dos and "office suites" was demanded by customers for interchangeability, but I've always felt I lost a lot when moving away from FinalWordII.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @08:10PM
But you should still be able to save. Because if you don't do the save but the system does it unpredictably you aren't always sure what version of the document was actually saved. More so if the system crashes or similar.
e.g. you are in the middle of a change that should be "atomic" and the system saves and the power goes off. Now your document is in an inconsistent state. Of course if you use version control you can rollback etc, but we're talking about normal folk.