Autosave never ever functions for me. But I’d like it to. For instance, I was working for a few hours this morning and had autosave set for 60 minutes, but when I used tsplines and Rhino crashed, the file in the autosave folder was from a few days ago. So I re-opened Rhino and set autosave to 1 minute. Without closing my session of Rhino, I opened the autosave file and it is still the days-old file that I had in there earlier. This has not worked as expected for me for years. Can it be fixed? Or is this user error?
Rhino never pauses to do an autosave - I never see it pop up in the command line, fyi.
I’m not convinced you know what the autosave tool really does.
Autosave does not save your file. It is a crash recovery feature, not a substitution for regularly saving your file.
If you have Autosave turned on, then a temporary file is written to the folder specified in options, and a flag is set that Rhino is running. When Rhino closes normally, it deletes this Autosave file and Rhino clears the flag.
If Rhino crashes, the flag is not cleared and the Autosave file still exists when Rhino starts the very next time. In that event, you are warned that Rhino did not close properly and you have this one chance to save your work from the Autosave file. If you say no, you lose the file.
It is not the equivalent of clicking on Save icon, and getting your 3DM file updated and saved.
If something else crashes, like your video drivers, then Rhino is left running without a way to display the application. You are forced to terminate Rhino using the Task Manager so no autosave file survives.
The best technique is to click on the save icon every 10 or 15 minutes.
Something else regarding saving files that might be of interest is to use the ‘idle processor’ in Options. If you set this to run the command IncrementalSave every time you aren’t using Rhino for X amount of time, you will have a constant back up of your work. The first time it runs, you’ll need to select a folder and file name if you haven’t saved the file before but after that it will just be magic. Keep in mind though, this will take lots of disk space if the file is large and you use a short period of time in the idle processor. Rhino also needs to have application focus, i.e. be on top of all the other programs running, for the idle process to run.
I do understand that the autosave file is deleted/cleared if I close Rhino normally. I don’t see it as a backup - I use incremental save for that.
Here’s a question that might solve why I don’t often have an autosave file when Rhino crashes. If I have autosave set to 60 minutes, work for 2 hours then incremental save, then Rhino crashes 10 minutes later, will I have an autosave or not? Does incremental save ‘close’ my current file and delete the autosave?
Does anyone have a quick fix for autosave? doesn’t work since weeks I think, only this version from the morning saved, worked on it after crash, now again a crash and no additional version created in the folder. Any hints? thanks a lot in advance! H
