Hello Paratext community,
I have found that Paratext’s autosaving behaviour is different than what I expect, so I thought I’d ask you what behaviour you expect, and what expectations you have observed in others.
I am a 32-year-old American working with a Quechua translation team in Peru. For me, and what I think would be good for my team, Paratext’s ideal autosave behaviour would be the following:
- Projects autosave every time a verse is edited and the user goes elsewhere (a resource, the next verse). Notes and note comments are autosaved upon creation.
- This behaviour is default upon installation.
Alternatively, PT could automatically save every 15 minutes. This could be changed in the settings to every 5 minutes, every 30 minutes, every hour, or never… In this case, autosaving between books and chapters would also be good.
I recognize that these settings would present an increased demand on resources, so it may need to considered if it would be feasible for users who have limited computer memory.
Last year our volunteer backtranslator backtranslated an entire chapter of Genesis, and then her computer crashed. She lost the entire chapter and was so discouraged, that she didn’t do any more work for a week.
On a related note, I had activated “Autosave (Automatically save changes without asking when switching to a different book or chapter.)” in Paratext 8. Some time after upgrading to version 9.0, I realized it has been unselected. Just now, many months after updating to 9.1, I noticed that it had been unselected again.
Is there a way for this option to be default, and for the setting to be carried through PT upgrades?
I think most users today take autosave for granted, and don’t have the habit of clicking on the “3½ Floppy-A” icon.
What do you think? What autosaving behaviour do you expect? What do you see in your teammates?
