always save layers locally

[richlv]

josm has had autosave for a while, and it has saved me a few times.
still, there are at least two cases where a terribly long time spent on editing some area is not visible in the data. the reason is not known - maybe josm crashed, maybe the upload failed behind the scenes, maybe the api ate the changeset. or maybe i'm having vivid dreams about editing osm for hours.

it would be great if there was a way to have "permanent" autosave - one that saves frequently, and be preserved after uploading. for uploaded layers, storing upload time and status would be very useful.

it would be optional, to avoid filling up the disk for unsuspecting users.

[mkoniecz]

"and be preserved after uploading" permanent preserving all data will quickly cause problems

It would be better to investigate what is causing data to disappear.

[richlv]

indeed - admittedly, i was thinking about such a feature more as a debug for dataloss. if i remember editing an area and don't remember a catastrophic crash that could have wiped out my edit and all autosaves, but the edit is not there, where do i go from here ?

maybe it was some weird network setup that accepted but nuked my upload, and it never got to the api ? who knows. but without a detailed information on the originating side, i have no information.

[richlv]

and this is not something that happens frequently. so far, i have two such cases. i vividly remember editing two areas in josm, based on photos - lots of edits, lots of detail, a lot of time spent. in both cases, there's no evidence whatsoever on the server about my edits. no stray autosaves in josm, nothing.

these were years apart. i'm not sure whether there's any other data that might be lost, but with such rare occurrences, it's a bit hard to track down without some debugging data being logged/saved.