Just had a remarkable loss of work: my OO-document refused to save, saying ‘can’t find this document because it doesn’t exist’. Yet the document was open! I tried to copy all content to save it in an other document. But copying didn’t work. Finally the program crashed, the work was gone and the document showed the status of some hours before. I couldn’t find an ‘Autosave’ function. Is there one or are there other strategies to prevent similar catastrophes?
Thanks for help
Matthias
Hi. I’m not an expert, but I believe that OO automatically saves its documents, because once in a while I get an error msg stating that an OO document could not be saved because an attachment had been modified by another app, etc…
But I was unable to find any documentation on this function. And I believe (but could be wrong on this) that its autosave function simply updates the one document. I don’t think it makes different versions of it.
While working on the document (in OO), is it possible that you did something to it in the Finder? Like move it to a different folder, etc.??
Do you use Time Machine?
Good luck.
As long as you haven’t checked “Ask to keep changes when closing documents” in OS X System Preferences / General, then Omni Outliner will both continuously autosave your document AND periodically save versions. I don’t remember the conditions that determine when versions are saved. You can revert to a previous version via File / Revert To …
And, as M_ichel mentioned, it’s a good idea to be running Time Machine. Actually, I belive the Omni versioning capability is in some way integrated with Time Machine.
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If you ever get into a situation where OO won’t save, export to OPML instead. Often it will work, and it’s trivial to reimport the OPML after restart.
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Hi M_ichel, fssbob and anamorph,
thanks a lot for your posts. Yes, normally OO autosaves automatically. For some reason it didn’t do it yesterday for several hours. Time machine was running, but showed at 5pm as well the version of 11am. Didn’t try to export, good idea, thanks, and I didn’t know about file/revert to, thanks for this input, I hope it will save me the next time. After all I conclude that ‘autosave’ is not an option I can check ‘on’ or ‘off’ and OO in that case just had a problem . So let’s hope it will not happen again to me or anyone else.
Thanks and regards
Matthias
Anyway to disable the autosave? Or find the archives? What a mess.
I have a bit of OCD and so I checked “Ask to keep changes when closing documents” on my Mac’s System Preferences. With that checked, I noticed that OO still auto saves your file. Don’t know how it does it but it does, but not for actual editing of the file.
Example: If I open an OO file and make an edit to it, like adding or deleting text(s), changing style etc… then OO will alert me when I exit OO, letting me know that the file got changed and will ask me to revert back or save the change. All is good! BUT, if I open an OO file, with no plan on editing it, but just to read/review some of my data, and changing the ZOOM level… and if OO is open for awhile, then OO will actually REMEMBER the zoom level and saved it to the actual OO file. How do I know? Cause when I exit OO it doesn’t alert me of anything (because I didn’t make any actual edit). When I open the same file, the zoom level is remembered.
I wonder what else OO is auto-saving without my knowledge.
Was messing around with OO just now and found out that it can still save your file without prompting you—Yes, even with “Ask to keep changes when closing documents” on my Mac’s System checked. Not sure if it will have the same effect on your Mac but try this:
Step 1: Open your important files (make sure to have it backup first).
Step 2: Make some edit to the file.
Step 3: Leave that important file open with the changes you just made.
Step 4: Create a new file and type in some random characters to this new file. Now QUIT the program. A dialog will appear asking you to either “delete” or “quit anyway” and when you do, it doesn’t bother to ask you whether you want to save the changes you made to your important file that you opened earlier. It just went ahead and automatically save it anyway.
There’s a way to prevent this via the terminal, but it comes with a disadvantage. The disadvantage is that you won’t be able to open your file and just browse around (without making any edit) like zooming, focusing, collapse and expand certain nodes etc… . WITHOUT having the program harass you with the dialog each time you quit the program.
At the moment, one thing I like about OO is that I can actually just browse through my file and then just exit the program (as long I don’t make any actual edit to the file) whenever. No hassle. However, if you do make random edit to your important file, keep the problem I described above in mind.
