Comment 47 for bug 817326

Hello Michael, thanks for your reply.

Please use fsync, even if it may cause some frozen GUI for a few milliseconds, keeping your data safe should be priority to *everything else*. And if only older Linux-systems are caught, even more so. (And I say that as a debian-Lenny user. Older installations are not upgraded to the latest LibreOffice versions that often anyway - and to be honest I was only interested in SVG, otherwise I would still be happily using OpenOffice 2.4) While I was somewhat "lucky" to lose only a few hours work (if the other file were lost, it would have been a week though...) other people on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/817326 reported many days and weeks worth of lost data. I don't think that a faster GUI can make up for that, even if you add it up over a user's lifetime.

In fact it would be a good idea to keep a backup copy somewhere (for example in ~/.libreoffice/3/user/backup) for all recently used documents. If you keep several versions, that would be a great feature because it would mitigate user-mistakes (most deletions are caused by user-mistakes).

I am a software developer myself and while it may be technically true that OpenOffice 2.4 also contains this bug (it's a *BUG*, not an enhancement proposal), it does not seem to appear as often. Maybe it's the combination with my NFS-setup (which has sometimes a delay of a few seconds because it has to spin up) or whatever, but 2.4 didn't do that for years, while 3.5 did it within a week after installation. In any case it's unacceptable.

So please use fsync. Most Linux-installation which will install LibreOffice >3.5 will be using ext4 anyway. (But as I said, even I as an ext3 user would prefer a frozen GUI to dataloss any day of the week.)