The term ‘autosave’ conjures the aroma of fresh baked cookies on a cold winter day. However my experience has been less poetic.
I read thru the posts on this topic and to my surprise, read that we shouldn’t count on autosave to autosave. That’s a new concept to me. Am I missing something here? I am old school - I remember when you HAD to manually save your work all the time because nobody had thought up the idea of autosave. I’m figuring I’m just missing something here.
Please advise, while I go see what I can learn about why I keep loosing the layout & model views… I have toolbars, but nothing to use them on. This happened three times today. I’m not even drawing anything complex. I may be gone a while.
Hello - I’m not sure what you’re describing… Here is what Autosave does:
The Autosave command saves the current file to the designated AutoSave(Number) file.
The automatic autosave mechanism periodically saves a copy of your current model.
This saved file is moved to the recycle bin when you successfully close your model.
If Rhino is not successfully closed, either because it crashed or because you turned off your computer while your file was open, the autosave file remains on your hard drive.
When you run Rhino and Rhino detected an autosaved file, Rhino prompts to save the recovered model.
Does that make any sense with what you’re running into? It does not save your current file - it saves an AutoSave file - you still need to save regularly.
Nit picking the description here: this could easily be read to mean that it just makes a copy of the original file on the disk into the autosave file. Could be more explicitly worded to make it clear that what it copies is the current “in memory” work that exists at the moment the autosave runs.
Autosave saves the file in the current state when it runs just in case Rhino crashes. However, if you close a Rhino file - saving it before you close or not - once the file has been successfully closed, the current autosave file is deleted, because it assumes you either saved your changes or didn’t want to do so, and that the current Rhino file now on disk is what you want to keep. As of V6, you can find the deleted autosave file in the trash just in case.
Thus Rhino’s autosave - assuming you have it enabled and set to run at a reasonable time increment - is simply crash insurance, not “I forgot to save” insurance.
I had not known about AutoDelete as a facet of AutoSave. That makes me more comfortable about all the files that are not there.
With this new knowledge, I have subverted the design intent for now. After reading this thread this morning, I began to AutoSave to Dropbox, whom, in their lust to fill the sky with ticker-tapes of random binary threads, archives every version of every file. I checked - it’s working.
When I solve all the oddities (probably mostly within my skill set), I will be OK without a graveyard to harvest old files from, but until then I am feeling better.