gnumeric doesn't appear to do backup autosave

[James Troup]

My laptop failed to resume while I was working on a spreadsheet in
gnumeric and I had to hard power cycle it. And as a result I've now
lost several hours of work because gnumeric doesn't appear to
implement any sort of backup autosave.

(This is using gnumeric 1.10.17-1ubuntu2 on Ubuntu 12.04.)

[Andreas J Guelzow (aguelzow)]

You can turn on autosave in Tools->AutSave.

[Andreas J Guelzow (aguelzow)]

If you want to have it on for new files by default you can do that using Edit->Preferences (Files tab).

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Sparhawk (sparhawkthesecond)]

Andreas: this appears to save to the existing file. It'd be much better to save to a alternative location (not overwrite the existing file) and to prompt for recovery when gnumeric is started again.

[rew (r-e-wolff)]

I just lost an hour of work when editing a simple formula that processes each of the elements I had painstakingly copied from elsewhere (I have a scan, of the data, not computer readable).

As my document had never been saved, Saving to the "original" is not easy (i.e. has to think of a name). Just a: ~/.gnumeric-autosave would've been very useful.

[Robert Spanjaard (spamtrap-arumes)]

Gnumeric version 1.12.28 on Xubuntu 16.04. This bug (or feature request, although I think it's such a serious omission in a productivity tool that it should be called a bug) is still present.