No automatic backup / shuttering when activating autosave
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#197 No automatic backup / shuttering when activating autosave
I just lost 5 hours of work because xournal crashed... I am a huge user of xournal and this is not the first time thi happends to me.
The problem is that the autosave feature is broken because it makes the program freeze everytime it saves which makes it hard to use. And there is no automatic backup to a .backup file like almost every editing program does...
Sorry for being so angry but this has happened too many times already, I am a huge user of this program as a student, and I think it deserves a better auto-save feature..
Thank you very much
I'm sorry that you lost work. Alas there's not much I can do for you,
except recommend that you look into the autosave_delay parameter of the
config file and adjust it so that auto-save works for you.
In more detail:
program which does auto-backups usually freezes for a short time during
the backup. Xournal has a lot of data to store and its backup takes
longer especially if you have a large file, and that is a genuine issue,
but I do not know of any easy solution. Xournal's architecture does not
make it possible to figure out which part of the document is already
saved and which part has been modified, so we can't selectively save a
backup of only the unsaved changes.
Xournal is not meant for very large documents. You can make the
auto-save faster and limit the amount of work lost by segmenting your
notes into reasonable sized chunks. On a modern entry-level PC I
recommend no more than 20 handwritten pages or 50 annotated PDF pages to
avoid slowdowns in a lot of places (not just saving/auto-saving); more
or less depending on your system.
You can change the time interval for the auto-save so that it remains
somewhat useful to you without slowing your work down so much. The
setting is in the .xournal/config file, in the line autosave_delay=...
For example, why not change it to 600 = 10 minutes, and enable autosave,
then you'll have the auto-save slowdown only once every 10 minutes,
which should be more bearable than the default setting if you are
editing large documents, and hopefully will prevent you from losing more
than 10 minutes of work.
(The default setting is really meant for small documents).
Xournal should not ever crash. (On linux at least. Windows is a
different beast, I don't understand windows). If you have an up to date
version there should not be any crashes. If you know what sort of
operations are sometimes causing xournal to crash on your system, I am
interested in details. (Do make sure you have an up to date version,
either 0.4.8.2016 or a 0.4.8 with equivalent bugfix patches).
Of course if the issue is that your distribution is inherently unstable
and the X server or kernel keep crashing then there's not much I can do
about it (nor you, apart from waiting for updates).
Denis
On 06/18/2018 05:55 PM, Nicolas de Vaucleroy wrote:
--
Denis Auroux
UC Berkeley, Department of Mathematics
817 Evans Hall, Berkeley CA 94720-3840, USA
auroux@math.berkeley.edu
Related
Feature Requests: #197
I see.. I din't know it was possible to chage the autosave settings...
Why not an option to autosave only when there is no activity ? Or the window not closed ? Because getting interupted mid writing is quite annoying, even only once every 10 mins.
I see, my documents aren't that long anyway but... but as for the save time, afaik it is not possible to write on two pages at the same time, so why not separate the document into pages for faster savings ? But I supposed you though about it already..
Well maybe an option to auto save when there is no activity to avoid being interupted, as noone really writes non stop.
I use Archlinux, and yes, normally it doesn't crash that often, it crashed when I scrolled fast backwards...
Thank you, I think we are a lot using this program on linux, and we apreciate evry QOL improvements. I am glad that you still anser to bug reports
Trying to detect lack of very recent activity is a good idea, though I'm
not sure what kind of delay to use -- when taking notes or writing
something one often stops for a few seconds between thoughts or
sentences, and there will always be a risk that we'll be auto-saving at
just the wrong time. I guess it will have to be customizable too.
I won't be able to get any work done over the next few weeks though, so
it won't happen imminently -- but will make a note of it for the future.
Denis
I thought about maybe seeing the focus of the window, etc..
Also another advantage is that it wont save when nothing changes and wear out the disk (only save once for every inactivity)
As for the risk of autosaving at the same time, it is there but still way less annoying than being interrupted mid swing.
I wanted to write a patch myself for that, I will send it if I ever do it !
It already doesn't do an auto-save when nothing has changed since the
last auto-save -- at least it shouldn't.
Window focus is probably not so relevant -- I assume most users have
xournal in fullscreen and it almost never loses the focus for the whole
session of work, at least when I'm inactive in xournal it's usually
because I'm thinking or listening or doing something that doesn't
involve switching to another application.
Thanks for your thoughts in any case.
Denis