I don't know if other people have this problem, but I find that the more immersed I am in playing a Quake map, the less likely I am to remember to quicksave. When I die, having to replay several minutes really breaks the immersion :-(
To fix this problem, I'm working on a patch which adds autosave/load to QuakeSpasm. Here's a snapshot:
http://github.com/downloads/ericwa/Quakespasm-Autosave/quakespasm.zip
Here's how it works: at regular intervals (no more frequently than every 30 seconds), it automatically creates a save called auto_{mapname}. When you die, the most recent save is loaded - regardless of whether it's an autosave, quicksave or normal save.
If you want to start a map from the beginning, you can use the "restart" command, or "map mapname".
It needs more testing - there are heuristics for deciding when to autosave which need to be tweaked - but check it out!
the code is here:
http://github.com/ericwa/Quakespasm-Autosave 