Auto Save exists

[David Vinayak Wallace <Gumby at MIT-MC>]

    Date: Monday, 9 January 1984, 23:21-EST
    From: David A. Moon <Moon at SCRC-TENEX>
	Date: Mon 9 Jan 84 15:02-EST
	From: David M. J. Saslav <SAZ@MIT-OZ>
	Wouldn't Auto Save Mode be a nice thing to incorporate
	into ZMACS?  A couple of us were griping about losing
	files due to system crashes, and I got "volunteered" to
	mail the request to see if anything could be done.

    Auto Save mode in Emacs forces you to wait while the file is written
    out.  You don't notice this too much since you aren't writing over the
    network and so the operation is reasonably fast, and also in a
    timesharing system you tend to get used to occasionally pauses where the
    machine stops responding for no obvious reason.

    If the Lisp machine had an Auto Save mode that worked this way, which
    would be easy enough to do, I'm not so sure you would like it.  It could
    perhaps do saving "in the background", but that would be more difficult
    and also presents the possibility of getting an inconsistent snapshot of
    the file if you are editing while it's saving.

Phil Agre wrote a background autosave which snapshots your buffer and
saves it away while you continue uninterrupted.