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It will not come natural to people who are used to work with physical documents that you need to remember to "save" an edit, or the document reverts back to the state it was when you opened it.
No, but you need to have a physical document to scribble on, which, after you have scribbled will remain in the state you left it until you take the active decision to throw it away.
Have you never used a copy machine?
Just throw it in the recycle bin? Another real-life metaphor. Do you often find objects in your physical world disappearing without no action from you?
Following the typical cloud implementation, you do not. Just start editing. It will be placed in a default folder under a default name until you rename it / and or move it somewhere else. (These operations are usually provided in more convenient ways than in "save paradigm" software, e.g., the name is shown as a title, just click to change it)
All of these -- except the Python Pandas project (see below) -- could still (and probably should) work according to a "you edit the doc itself, no need to save" paradigm. The larger the underlying file, the less sense does it make to forcibly have to work on a copy; either in RAM (if it fits) or if it doesn't fit, the software has to create an on-disk copy of your huge file behind your back, in case you decide to not save. Leading to all these messy "recovery semantics" that no one likes.
Now, the context of this whole thread is IMO GUI software. When it comes to programming/programmatic tools, e.g. Python Pandas, R, Matlab, etc., that is a different thing. There you have a choice to work in RAM or on disk depending on your needs.
What a nightmare.
Why don't we just let things default to not auto save but you can turn it on at anytime.
I personally hate it. Absolutely hate it.
I want to put things where I want them the first time when I am ready. I don't use cloud services, I have my own network and cloud file shares. I don't want some program choosing when and where to save something for me, because it is extra work finding all these garbage files I didn't ask for.
For this one aspect, compared to a program that implements autorecovery, there is barely any practical difference. Autorecovery has to imply some kind of autosave, just behind your back in some program-specific "hidden" default folder.
Maybe you really like the "old-school" document GUI with no recovery, where you train your muscle memory to, e.g., ctrl+s every minute; and when something crashes, that's the point you go back to. But this is a punishing workflow for beginners.
And this is not "in theory". I've countless times seen real, smart, computer-literal, people lose significant amounts of work precisely this way to software implementating this paradigm.
I realize the tone of this conversation may make it sound as if I want to force this on you all the way down to, what can it be - vim? I'm mostly picturing LibreOffice, Inkskape, etc., software that to some degree try to appeal as "desktop software" to fairly normal users. I think in these cases the "you are editing the doc itself"-paradigm would be vastly more friendly to new users.