As part of the never ending quest to keep making Rhino awesomer, I’m gathering some data to try and tune up our Autosave feature and hopefully make it more useful.
Please answer the following-
Do you use Autosave?
Has it actually saved work for you when you needed it?
Have you ever lost work you were expecting Autosave to save for you? (If so do you have any specifics of what happened?)
Do you know where to find your Autosaved files in the case of a problem?
Does it do what you expected it to do? (If not why, and what did you expect?)
Teach Rhino to save files in the background
This is my most important thought on AutoSave in Rhino and saving files in general. This is probably the biggest bottleneck we face and speeding up saving times would be the largest time-saver imaginable over here:
If you find there is no AutoSave file in the configured folder, look in your Windows Recycle Bin. When old AutoSave files are deleted, that’s where they go.
Yes. If a new file hasn’t been saved at all before something goes wrong. Typically what goes wrong is a plug-in causing a crash or loss of power on my laptop.
Yes.
I now know what to expect, so yes.
Grasshopper’s autosave has much better UX. I would like Rhino’s autosave to work exactly like grasshopper’s. With rhino, if you crash, when you reopen, you get one prompt to restore the file that closed when you crashed. With Grasshopper, when you open any individual file that was unsaved before a crash or an unintentional power loss, you get a prompt about whether or not to restore that specific file, and that prompt is waiting for you even if you don’t reopen that specific file for weeks or months.
1 yes
2 yes
3 yes. Not often but it happens. Can’t remember any specifics
4 yes, but like others go to option and copy path
5 yes
6 I Would like having more easy access to the autosaves.
1 yes
2 yes. many
3 … I don’t remember …
4. I search the trash … if there is another place. you tell me
5 yes in general. but the only downside it takes a lot of time if the files are larger than 600 mo
6. you can program rhino to send reminders messages for saving genre (do you want to save the file yes / not) … the time between messages can be configured by the user in rhino
thank you
fares
I don’t think so, but it’s been quite a while since I needed to recover one. Probably V5 or earlier.
No, but I know some places to look for the answer. Suggestion: Include a specific help item that summarizes where to look for the most recent and earlier ones in the help menu and make it part of the program file so it’s right there for the offline users, even the ones who haven’t downloaded the offline help.
Yes, because I think I have a pretty good understanding of how it works so I know what to expect.
I heartily agree that it takes a long time to autosave and it’s undesirable that it stops user activity until it’s done. I don’t think that it would be possible to take a snapshot to RAM and then save it in the background for anything but the smaller models, but for them it would probably work pretty well. For the larger models that would spill over into virtual RAM, it would be slower than writing it direct to disk in the first place.
Would there be any clever way of taking a “rolling” snapshot that doesn’t require copying the entire model to “core” (you can tell how long I’ve been around computers) at once? Since the time-consuming part of the “snapshot”/background writing scheme is the writing to storage, maybe the snapshots could be done in suitably sized chunks where user interaction is stalled for a few seconds, then the disk writing could take place in the background. When that’s done, another snapshot would be taken, etc. You wouldn’t end up with an integral snapshot but it would probably be a perfectly usable backup.
Yes, Problem is that Autosave is saving the File using the Documentname. If i have open 2 Rhino parallel and in both are new Project without custom Documentname the Autosave is getting override from both instances
1: Yes
2: Yes, numerous times!
3: Maybe back in the days, but it would be years ago.
4: Yes, but Rhino usually finds the file all by itself.
5: Yes
6: It’s a PIA on large files, since saving can take minutes - but I’ll take that over losing hours of work.
1 - Yes, a lot
2 - Yes, a lot
3 - Some times I just want to go back … It’s my fault, not a Rhino fault (stop responding for example)
4 - Yes… I go to the Options… but should be in other place… more clear
5 and 6 - No!
Please put a option to keep the last XX autosaves! That would be very usefull in architecture… For example in vectorworks I have the option to make autosave from 10 to 10 minutes and keep the last 50 versions…
no it has never worked the files are always too old.
Yes but it’s the same as answered in 2 the file never reflects the modeling stages up to the crash.
Yes but that’s a hassle as is all of where windows hides stuff on c
Not really since it never helps in a crash
Better than autosave is when you crash and reopen rhino you get a message: Rhino has a recovery file, that has worked well, but lately all my crashes haven’t generated a recovery file.
RM
It takes some digging to find it if you don’t get the crash prompt. I think less savvy users probably don’t know there’s a folder somewhere with their older autosaves.
Yup
Is there a way for autosave to happen in the background? I find Rhino gets unresponsive while Autosaving a large file. This is especially a problem if the file is opened from something like a slow network drive. Rhino becomes completely unresponsive for minutes in some cases while autosave is being completed.
Untill now, I thought that Autosave = Backup (.BAK). What is the difference between these two?
I always assumed I could “open” the .bak file and resume working from the last saved status.
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