How about an auto-save? You tell it a directory in the preferences where it should auto-save out what you have written so far - perhaps named after the date or with some user editable naming system?

I just had my Xjournal crash out on me after writing a rather long journal entry. I suppose I "should" have saved out on my own, but I usually do that upon exiting the program instead of as I'm typing.

That way, it auto-saves out, and then when you post, it gets rid of the auto-save file. Then if it starts up and sees that there is a file in there, it can assume that something happened last time you were using the app and it can ask if you want to continue in the file that you were last working on?

Or maybe I need to learn to write much shorter journal entries.

mine saves all of the posts in a 'queue' which you can re-flush out later, in case the server is down or slow. it will also retry to post the event a few times.

there are no 'buttons' on mine, since it's all text-based. there are no graphics. ;)

I suspect LJ eating your post is actually your web browser failing to post. Any good client should not delete what you have typed unless the request to post succeeded.

Crashing is a different problem, and the only one that really needs to save to disk.
logjam autosaves drafts, and deletes it if you quit. If it crashes (which it doesn't do very often anymore) the draft will still be there and it'll find it the next time it starts.

A hacky version for Windows is available here but I don't recommend it.

If you do it wrong you have people who complain of their "private data" being put where anybody can read it. Yeah, it is a fairly trivial thing to add, but it has to be done right or the dissenters won't like it. :)

I've been playing this for LochJournal for ages. Just haven't gotten around to it.

Drivel autosaves posts and deletes the autosave after posting is complete. If it detects a non-empty autosave file on startup, it loads it automatically. It also includes "Save Draft/Open Draft" buttons in the File menu. :)

logjam allows you to save entries (even autosaves them). which is a useful thing, because i always have problems with that program spouting out sig11's (especially the older versions).

It's on my wishlist for SCLJ 3 (current status: vaporware), but there's no good way to do it in 2.x because of the way the data structure is held in RAM. (Data::Dumper might work with minimal effort, but would be somewhat brittle.)

So yeah... only well-designed clients can do cool stuff like that.

Well I've just fixed up my ruby client to do this, but only if you get as far as posting, I really ought to get of my backside and do some kind of drafting/versioning thing, maybe at the weekend :>

I'm currently using Win32-MFC, are there any other clients I can use for Win that will allow me to recover last post/Prevent a post from being purged?

Win32 actually doesn't purge the post if it fails...but it doesn't save it, so if you close the program, it goes bye bye as well.
I can't tell you about .NET Sema or LochJournal though.