Sorry if this comes off a little bit like a vent but why are datablocks for Actions and Materials still so easily eliminated when closing a file or forgetting to hit the shield?
I know this is seen as a feature to some but honestly this is super dangerous behaviour for a software where you can easily spend a few hours creating a material, then assigning a different temp to check something and hitting Ctrl-S by instinct (like one is trained to do from any other software were you hit Ctrl-S not to lose something).
I just only barely did not eliminate a few hours of work and only because of the auto save backups.
This really can not be considered an acceptable default behaviour for a professional software! 
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I agree it’s awful. (And probably most users agree?)
There’s a design task for that opened before 2.80: https://developer.blender.org/T61209
But it seems other priorities took over.
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Cool - didn’t know about that. Good to know it is on the agenda. The proposal is over 18 months old, thogh. How can the easy and permanent loss of data still be on a ‘medium’ priority?
It’s a solid proposal. In the meantime, before it’s fully implemented it would be great to have at least a warning on exiting telling you the stats of what gets deleted - basically the same message like the ‘purge all’ dialogue.
Gotta say I agree here, even though I’ve never lost a significant amount of work due to this feature. I reckon the outliner provides a good enough way to delete unwanted/unused datablocks manually, so keeping all datablocks by default and letting the users decide for themselves (even if this means that files may get larger) seems like the most desireable option here.