Why does AutoSave in Office 365 only work on Microsoft OneDrive?!?

Anonymous
2019-02-03T21:53:24+00:00

Recently I lost power in my home after working on a spreadsheet for over three hours. Even though Auto-save was turned on in preferences, I lost ALL the work-- Auto-recover did not capture any of the changes, either. I had to spend the rest of the day re-creating my changes.

Needless to say, I was pretty pissed off, and went to research how Microsoft had managed to lose all my data. I first went to confirm that AutoSave was turned on, and found "Turn on AutoSave by default" checked on the Preferences/Save panel. However, in the document title bar, AutoSave displayed as "OFF" and was grayed out to the point of imperceptibility. This is true not just of Excel, but Word and Powerpoint as well.

I licensed Office 365 from GoDaddy, so I called their tech support line, and they gave me the incredible story that AUTOSAVE ONLY WORKS WHEN YOU STORE YOUR DOCUMENTS ON MICROSOFT ONEDRIVE - not natively on the Mac or on DropBox, which I've used for years.

****, are you kidding me? According to the "Datanyze.com" website, OneDrive has less than 9% of the "File Sharing" market, well behind DropBox, Box, and GoogleDrive. Even assuming that all Google users are backed up to Google's servers, 2/3 of users out there aren't able to automatically back up their changes because they don't use OneDrive.

Even worse, most have probably been head-faked by Microsoft into thinking that they're safe because AutoSave displays as automatically turned on in Preferences. They don't notice the obscure label in the title bar and don't find out it's actually not turned on until they're hit with a disaster like I was, and then wonder **** happened. 

This policy is patently irresponsible, and anti-competitive to boot.  In order to have AutoSave, you not only have to store your documents on OneDrive, you have to start them up from OneDrive - not your Mac hard drive folder icon - or AutoSave is still turned off.

Now, I'm back to the pre-cloud days of having to constantly remember to save documents as I make important changes to them. Seriously?!?

And don't suggest that AutoRecover will keep me covered in the absence of AutoSave: I've lost countless hours of work when AutoRecover does not do its job. Its reliability on the Mac has always been spotty.

This is crazy. Is Microsoft really willing to callously risk the data integrity of the majority of its users just to coerce them to switch to OneDrive?!?

IMHO, what Microsoft needs to do is:

  1. Display clearly in Preferences/Save that AutoSave is NOT turned on (and change the misleading "automatically as default" wording),
  2. State the reason (i.e. OneDrive required) so that users like me don't waste hours trying to determine whether it's just one more Office 365 bug,
  3. Add a local backup feature to Office 365 to automatically save to a hard-drive or competitive file sharing service (it can't be that hard),
  4. Stop being evil by claiming that not enough people have complained about the missing feature to justify its renewed availability.

Really, Microsoft should be ashamed of having pulled a stunt like this. It's an irresponsible, blatantly anti-competitive move, straight out of the naughty 80s.

[NOTE - this post has been updated to reflect the fact that AutoSave was a more recent development by Microsoft, not a long-standing feature.]

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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  1. Jim G 134K Reputation points MVP
    2019-10-16T18:33:22+00:00

    That's why Apple provides Time Machine. Use it!

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  2. Jim G 134K Reputation points MVP
    2019-10-15T18:42:09+00:00

    AutoRECOVER saves automatically locally, as does Apple's Time Machine.

    AutoSAVE saves automatically to OneDrive and SharePoint.

    If you save elsewhere, whatever system you save to is responsible for backups.

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  3. Jim G 134K Reputation points MVP
    2019-10-11T16:53:40+00:00

    Hi

    Are you using Windows PC or a Mac?

    The scenario you described can't happen on a Mac. If you had a presentation open and Mac OS tries to install updates, in the shutdown process PowerPoint displays a dialog asking whether you want to save, not save or cancel and just keep working in PowerPoint.

    Mac OS shutdown will wait for your decision. Mac OS shutdown will time out after a minute of waiting and stop attempting to shut your Mac down and not shut your computer off.

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  4. Jim G 134K Reputation points MVP
    2019-09-24T16:18:20+00:00

    OK - Let's focus on the way AutoRecover works. It is a "dicey" method and you are absolutely right about that.

    Ideally, Excel saves a temp file at the time interval you specified in Excel preferences. Excel erases that temp file when you save the workbook you're working on, or when you close it normally and say, "Don't Save." When the workbook closes normally, the temp file is not needed.

    The only time the temp file can be recovered is after a crash or power failure, which means Excel did not get a chance to automatically delete it. The problem with this whole thing is that if Excel crashed, there was probably corruption beyond repair in the workbook, and if the workbook was saved as a Temp file, so was the corruption and then the temp file is unusable. If the crash or power failure occurs while the temp file is being written, that also results in an unusable temp file.

    If you are able to use self-discipline, you can invent a method that you can use to save your files with a new file name every so often. That's pretty old-school.

    A better way would be to use a Macro that does the saving and versioning for you. There are many takes on how to go about this. Here's one of many links I found on this topic. If it were me, I would go this route and have my macro save a new version with the date and time every 15 minutes or so. Excel Workbook Backup | Excel VBA Tutorial | Excellen

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  5. Jim G 134K Reputation points MVP
    2019-09-23T16:34:45+00:00

    It's impossible for AutoSave to work when saving off-line because AutoSave is provided by the server, not your Mac. If you're not connected to the server, the server has no way of knowing about any revisions that were made and therefore can't save a new version.

    I think the confusion relates to the basic question asked at the beginning of this thread,  "Why does AutoSave in Office 365 only work on Microsoft OneDrive?!?"

    The answer is that AutoRecover is a feature that has existed for many years and works with files saved locally. When the idea of saving to "the cloud" which in Microsoft's case is either OneDrive or SharePoint, an entirely new backup method had to be invented. The new method was dubbed AutoSave to denote a new feature that works differently from AutoRecover.

    The similarity in feature names has proven to be problematic. Perhaps Microsoft should rename AutoSave to something like Cloud Version, Cloud Backup, Cloud Recovery or some other moniker that makes it sound different because it is quite different from AutoRecover.

    You're covered if you save locally by AutoRecover. You're covered if you save to OneDrive or SharePoint by AutoSave. If you save to a network file location or some other cloud, then you get whatever that network or cloud service has to offer (sometimes it's no backup, sometimes it's complete backup - Microsoft has no way of knowing).

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