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. Anonymous
    2020-03-05T15:15:48+00:00

    Ok, I get it. I'll stop feeding the trolls.

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  2. Jim G 134K Reputation points MVP
    2020-03-05T15:08:42+00:00

    Hi

    DropBox explains how their incremental backup system works here:

    Incremental Backup and Delta Sync - Dropbox

    On that page you will find this:

    Dropbox has its own file backup method called delta sync, which is most akin to an incremental method to backup files. Delta sync provides faster backup through rapid file syncs and takes up less storage space overall, which translates to smoother, simplified workflows for all Dropbox users.

    Specifically, regarding recovery of files on DropBox, see this:

    Lost file recovery and file history - Dropbox

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-03-04T20:06:08+00:00

    What I meant was not all the extra features the current implementation of AutoSave provides to be made drive/cloug agnostic, I think I can say that we all here understand what AutoSave is. What we argue is that there isn't a dead simple feature that used to exist that basically automatically saves your document for you every x minutes. No version history, no cooperative or simultaneous or whatever editing, nothing fancy. Just save the bloody document automatically, regardless where it is. Press ctrl+s every minute for me. That's it. It isn't rocket surgery and this feature existed.

    I understand that there's AutoRecover, and what I was arguing, is that it is entirely useless. For me, it might have worked around 5% of the time when I had power loss or anything that resulted in loss of work.

    The bottom line is that if I'm not using OneDrive when editing a document, i'm utterly screwed if the software crashes (happens more often than you think), I have a power loss or anything else. I lost enough time lately because of the lack of such feature, I might as well return using paper an pencil. Certainly more advanced than the office suite in terms of reliability of data storage.

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-03-04T19:41:44+00:00

    This doesn't help when Microsoft products are not compatible with other cloud backup systems any longer.  I am heavily invested in what I use currently.  I pay an annual subscription to it and get much more storage space than Microsoft would give me for the same space, in addition to the annual fee I begrudgingly pay Microsoft for Office 365.  I didn't purchase O365, it was a 'family' decision that I was outvoted on.  Personally, I would rather use either our old MS Office 2010 or LibreOffice.  There is no annual fee for those and both work swimmingly with any cloud backup I care to use.

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-03-04T19:33:13+00:00

    Since MS, presumably marketing, renamed Hotmail etc to Outlook.com that has led to confusion with MS Outlook, so I doubt that your feature post would lead to anything, no matter how well meaning

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