I have to be a bit blunt (no offense) Pelle is not responsible for you having backups. The IDE takes reasonable effort to save your files
but in reality could be completely absent (as is the case with some other compilers) And this is more like a feature
request than anything else. But a bug it is certainly not.
You said one true thing, its more or less a feature request.
Sorry...
But when Pelles C is running, it never saves completely the file that us are working on. Looks like the file is write, but at the same time is hold some type of lock, maybe its a memory mapped file, I dont know.
For example, it could be that, when Pelles C crashes or in the event of a loss of energy, the cache used by Windows cannot be flushed and the file gets corrupt, probably because of the file being memory mapped.
If its the problem, computers today with Windows 7 are fast and have plenty of memory, maybe could be a good idea to load the file completely to the memory, or better load and write it in pieces, simulating a memory mapped file (not in the strict sense).
All your points are very, very true, but the need to use always the backup to recover files is not a good thing also, in terms of what is correct or not (the best option, lets say).
But its a very good feature, and its validity is not hidden completely by us doing backups, like could look.
But I understand everything.