Bug 154109 - Help the user make a decision on AutoRecovery by showing last autosave times vs last manual save timestamp
Summary: Help the user make a decision on AutoRecovery by showing last autosave times ...
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: UI (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
Inherited From OOo
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks: AutoSave-AutoRecovery-Backup
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Reported: 2023-03-10 02:49 UTC by Jeff Fortin Tam
Modified: 2023-09-11 14:48 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


Attachments
screenshot of the current AutoRecovery user prompt GUI dialog (24.82 KB, image/png)
2023-03-10 02:49 UTC, Jeff Fortin Tam
Details

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Description Jeff Fortin Tam 2023-03-10 02:49:59 UTC
Created attachment 185878 [details]
screenshot of the current AutoRecovery user prompt GUI dialog

After a crash, the document AutoRecovery UI prompt dialog that occurs, when you re-launch LibreOffice (or open an associated document), is not as helpful as it could be to help me make informed decisions on whether I want to actually use the autosave or not.

I am presuming (I hope) that it only ever considers autosaves whose "last modification time" are newer than the last modification time of the corresponding manually saved file (if not, the AutoRecovery code would be very dangerous)... however, sometimes I might really want to load the last *manually* saved version that acted as a safe checkpoint, but to be sure I need to know how fresh my last manual checkpoint is in comparison to whatever I was experimenting on.

It would be nice if, in addition to showing the document checkbox+name column, it would show me some columns for:

* Last recovery saved: a human-readable relative time (ex: "3 minutes ago", "55 minutes ago", "1 hour and 5 minutes ago", "7 hours ago", "Thursday at 16:45")

* Last manual save: "Thursday at 14:40"

That would be useful and reassuring to me as a user.

If you don't want to dedicate columns to this, maybe this information could be provided as a tooltip on hovering those items with the mouse.


In comparison, I don't attribute as much usefulness to the "Status" column, as there is already a global progressbar widget and the individual recovery statuses could simply be conveyed by putting ✅/❌ emojis/icons near recovered documents (instead of needing a whole column to tell me which documents have been processed; descriptive tooltips could be used on hovering those icons instead of needing a label).
Comment 1 Heiko Tietze 2023-03-13 12:34:55 UTC
The idea sounds reasonably to me.

Don't know how much effort the "human-readable relative time" is; and something like "2023/Mar/13 13:27" (resp. the locale date/time format) takes a lot of space, in particular when stated twice for the saved version. And this information makes only sense if auto recovery and saving time differs vastly, which I doubt. Plus, sometimes you do a lot of editing in 5min sometimes you can tolerate a loss of hours. Could be more interesting to get a clue of the document status like number of pages, file size etc.

In a nutshell, I'd start with just the date/time of the auto recovery file.