Everyone learns compulsive ctrl-s eventually.

That could be a great learning experience. If it’s an important document not only do I save regularily, I also create copies of the file at regular intervals.

Side note : You say she’s a bad typist so you type it for her. But how exactly is she going to learn how to type then?

Maybe just let her do things poorly and learn

3 take aways from this that I hope you’ll get:

1. Learn to save often. Sometimes that means 5x in a row just to be sure.
2. Never just assume the software is going to save you from yourself. Its OK to trust software, but you gotta make sure it does what you expect it to do. In this case, that means either checking those settings when you start out, or making sure the file exists on disk.
3. Invest in some typing games for your kid so they learn how to type properly and can do their own work! I understand wanting to help your kid succeed, but you can’t do that in the long term without crippling their development.

I wouldn’t have learned to type if a teacher hadn’t lied to me and told me that I wouldn’t be allowed to go to high school unless I could pass a basic typing test. It enraged me at the time when I found out, but it was one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me in the long run.

My mom was like you, well intentioned and getting involved a lot, to my detriment. I’ve never been able to get across to her that I would have been better off as an adult if I’d been allowed to struggle and accept consequences more as a kid. This became extremely apparent to me when I went to boarding school as an older teen, and had to catch up fast to my more self reliant peers. Getting away from people going overboard to help me was the best thing that ever happened to me, and I watched the same pattern play out with a lot of other students who had overly loving parents. The road to hell can be paved with good intentions.

Typing things for your kid is like reading things for your kid—it is such a fundamental skill that not being forced to reach your potential in it will massively change your life for the worse. My mom was a teacher for over 20 years, and the three biggest factors in success were reading ability, reading comprehension, and typing (as the modern form of writing). None of those skills are going to be obtained with anything other than exposure, practice, and time. You can give someone tools for practicing, but you can’t do the practicing for them.

I saw in your comments that your daughter has a learning disability, but all of this still stands. She will be judged against her peers as an adult, regardless of her diagnosis, so it’s best to start finding ways to work with it now.

So in unrelated news I had to replace a keycap because… yeah.

Us older folks automatically hit save every few minutes. But not saving days worth of work is asking for trouble.

While I can understand you wanting autosave on in your situation, I much prefer autosave off because I often open files to see what is in them and do not want to automatically modify them just because I accidentally hit a key and delete it. Automatically changing stuff is a choice you should have to make, not a feature that I have to race to disable.

Unless she is has some sort of disability, you typing for her just seems like enablement.

This is the most classic case of “safety feature makes people unsafe” I’ve ever seen.

This kind of thing didn’t happen before auto save, because everyone knew to save.

On the other hand… consider if your cat had walked over the keyboard before it rebooted and replaced it all with hhhhgggggggggggggggggggghgf before it auto saved and replaced the document. Would you still be an advocate for auto save?

It sucks to lose work, but this is clearly a user error.