At some point in your life, whilst writing an important document, your computer will crash and you’ll have lost all your unsaved changes.
Sadly, this been a fact of life for many computer users, and many of us have frequent saving ingrained into our fingertips as we type.
In recent years, there have been moves towards an Autosaving model. Google Docs is the most famous of these. If you haven’t used Google Docs, we advise you give it a try!
It’s a wonderful piece of software, emulating many features of the popular Microsoft Office suite in your web browser. One of the features it gives you is that it saves automatically, every 30-40 seconds. As a result, you almost never lose work.
When you are using Autosaving, it’s vital to combine it with versioning. The one danger of Autosaving is that if you accidentally select a huge chunk of work, hit backspace, you’ve lost it all, and then the program neatly saves over it. How Google Docs gets around this is offering you 3 hourly backup versions, which you can revert to at any time. You can also repeatedly undo, even if you close your browser and navigate away from the page.
Pros:
- Thoughtless: There’s no need to consider how long it is since you last saved, so you can just concentrate on your work.
- Simple: There’s no danger of your client losing work because they did not understand the interface, didn’t read the instructions, didn’t get the paradigm. What they type in gets saved. What they can see is what is there. Easy to understand, easy to communicate.
Cons:
- Load: If you’ve got one group of 100 users using regular saving, who press save every 15 to 20 minutes, and one group of users using autosaving, who have their work saved every 45 seconds, guess which group causes the most load on your server? As with many trade-offs in web application development, in order to give your users the most seamless experience possible you need a better server.
