Furthermore, if the laptop randomly reboots for no reason, autosave won't save you. You just need a tiny bit of bad luck for the computer to crash while saving, corrupting the perfectly-good file saved to disk.
Hardly how file saving works. Else you could say the same about a bit of bad luck for the computer to crash while pressing ctrl-s, corrupting the perfectly-good file saved on disk.
Too many people on this thread seem to see autosave and ctrl-s as two different things, governed by magic and mystery, one of them indispensable to conside nyourself an experienced computer user. It's the same fucking piece of code, in one case invoked by a timer, in the other one by the end user pressing a key combo.
Op's issue was that automated was disabled by default. Obviously autosave doesn't work it it's disabled.