[Dalewyn]

>For me and windows it was when it updated a hibernating unplugged laptop overnight causing me to loose several hours of genealogy work. I had been using a new to me application that hadn't been doing any sort of background saving while I put in information. My had some niblings come over so I shut my unplugged laptop thinking id get back at it tomorrow. The next day when I opened the laptop I was greeted with the dreaded "Hi" screen, and my previous days work was gone.

To be fair and with no personal offense intended, this sounds more like a case of PEBKAC rather than specifically a Windows deficiency.

To be clear, I agree Windows's forced, silent autoupdates and reboots are crimes against humanity, but "losing work I did not save" is hardly something that only applies to Windows and is a lesson we all learn the hard way eventually.

Always save, and if you think you saved, save again. Probably hit CTRL+S several times too for good measure. And keep backups; multiple, good, working backups.

[asciimov]

If it happens to me, an active computer user for 25 years, think of how often this has happened to others. How much work has frustratingly been lost because Windows knows better about when to update.

Worse is technologically speaking this shouldn't even happen. Windows should be able to take a running application, save its state, do its update, reboot, then restore the application, without loosing a single byte of application state. Microsoft's lack of compassion for end users in this regard comes directly from it not effecting their bottom line.

[Dalewyn]

The vast majority of computer users, Windows users and otherwise, have experienced some form or another of data loss. I'm just being fair to Windows (and you!).

To go back to your example, you lost your work after Windows decided to silently update and reboot overnight. Now the million dollar question: Why didn't you save your work before you left?

A blackout or a drive crash or any number of failure cases could have happened instead and you would have still lost that unsaved data, too.

You're going to eventually lose any data you do not explicitly save. To put it another way, any data you don't save should be data you don't mind losing.

Windows 10/11's autoupdates are fucking nonsense, but data loss of the kind you're speaking of is by far a case of PEBKAC in my opinion. If you lose data overnight, that's because you didn't take basic steps to save and protect your data.

[NateEag]

> To go back to your example, you lost your work after Windows decided to silently update and reboot overnight. Now the million dollar question: Why didn't you save your work before you left?

Because humans are not perfectly consistent robots.

Any system design or paradigm that expects us to be is broken and user-hostile.

For myself, I have Emacs configured to autosave whenever I change focus or documents. I also commit and push whenever I make a meaningful step of progress.

For normals, built-in macOS apps like TextEdit have autosave these years. Pair that with Time Machine and an SMB NAS (see https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202784), and data loss is pretty darned rare in practice.

If the NAS has a cloud backup system, you'd really have to try to lose data.

[meribold]

> A blackout or a drive crash or any number of failure cases could have happened instead and you would have still lost that unsaved data, too.

GP said he was using a laptop that was unplugged. A blackout wouldn't have made a difference. And in the case of a drive crash, saving (locally) wouldn't have helped.

I think automatic updates really deserve a fair share of the blame here.

[lelanthran]

> To be fair and with no personal offense intended, this sounds more like a case of PEBKAC rather than specifically a Windows deficiency.

It's specifically a deficiency of the OS when it decides that the work you purchased the computer for is not as important as the work that Microsoft wants the computer to do.

No vendor, OS or otherwise, should decide that using the consumers computer for their (vendor's) own purposes is more important than the work that the computer was purchased for.

> To be clear, I agree Windows's forced, silent autoupdates and reboots are crimes against humanity, but "losing work I did not save" is hardly something that only applies to Windows and is a lesson we all learn the hard way eventually.

"Losing work I did not save because I forgot" is different from "the computer decided to discard all my work while I was working"

If you're in the middle of driving to work, and your car decides to pull over because Ford wants to do something is very different to driving to work and running out of fuel.

If you forget/refuse to fill fuel, that's on you when you get stuck. If you did everything right and still the car pulls over because the manufacturer wants to do something, that's not on you.