Back in the bad old days when personal computers weren’t nearly as reliable as they are today, it was common to have your computer crash when you were right in the middle of writing a document. Because of that, a common mantra was, “save early and often”. That way, when the crash came you would have only a few lines to rewrite.
I first heard the particular expression “save early and often” from Jerry Pournelle but it may not have originated with him. It was common advice back then but the humorous twist does seem like Pournelle, so who knows. In any event, in those days it wasn’t just good advice, it was mandatory.
I was reminded of all this the other day when I was writing yesterday’s post on the latency of computer operations. I was switching back and forth between the post’s Emacs buffer and Ahmad’s post in Safari, when Safari suddenly froze and I couldn’t find a way to break out of it and get back to Emacs to save my buffer, which, sadly, I hadn’t bothered to backup as I went along. In the end, I had to reboot the machine to get things back to normal.
Of course my whole post was gone when my laptop came back up. Note that this was not Emacs’ fault. It was Safari that froze and it was me that didn’t bother saving my work. Actually, Emacs was the hero in all this because the autosave function rescued me from my folly. I hardly ever need to use it so I always have a hard time remembering what to do but in the end I got almost my whole post back.
The takeaway from all this is that even with reliable hardware and software, crashes and freezes can still happen so if you care about your work make sure to back it up often. Or, as Pournelle would have it, early and often. If you don’t, the day will come when even Emacs can’t save you.