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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 The CD/DVD can no longer represent saving, because they have come and gone.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: 2) by DutchUncle on Tuesday December 20 2016, @07:32PM
Had to respond to "given the cheapness of disk storage". Back in the days we're all talking about, it wasn't. While being able to recover old versions of files is handy sometimes, it's not what you want most of the time. OTOH since in real life NO system actually overwrites the old copy - it really writes a new copy and then switches names, unless you work really hard at doing in-place operations (which only worked on certain hard drives) - keeping the old copy is not hard. OTOOH, leaving unlimited old copies around isn't such a good plan either. The solution might be simpler: we already tend to have a distinction between "save" and "save as"; if we just standardize as "save as" with an additional click to select "same name" (not just having it pre-filled-in) then it's as easy as it is now, and with the clarity you want.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @12:45AM
The "write new data stream, drop old data and swap names" is not what seems to be done by many coders. How do I know? Any fucked program that tries to save, fails for whatever reason (disk quota, process crash, hw powerdown)... and now you have no valid data at all, new or old. The filesystem may not overwrite, but from user space the data is gone/damaged and will require some luck and special tools to recover.
So no, too many coders don't even know how to properly replace file contents, even if the method was in computing litetature at least since early 80s. Every 5-10 years all the data dance with fseek, fsync, etc will hit the news but coders will quickly forget again, or even go silly like hitting fsync over and over ("I heard this keeps the data, DO IT!") instead of plan correctly how to balance integrity and speed.