Have an option to do incremental saves for documents and auto-save

[Frozen Death Knight]

One feature I hope gets added is the ability to have automatic incremental saves of a document. There have been times when of some unknown reason my documents get corrupted and lose data as a result of a save (happened to me just the other day). Having the option to have back-up copies that are a bit older than the latest save would help in safeguarding documents from getting unrecoverable data loss. 

Auto-save with a timer is also a feature that goes hand in hand with the previous feature. It makes it easier to ensure you have a reliable back-up copy in case of breaking documents.

Being able to set these things up as either on a per document basis or done globally would be even sweeter.

 

[walt.farrell]

I'm not sure what you mean by incremental saves. If you're suggesting an automatic timed Save As, I think that's a reasonable idea, but that would be a complete save to a new file, not incremental I think.

[Frozen Death Knight]

7 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I'm not sure what you mean by incremental saves. If you're suggesting an automatic timed Save As, I think that's a reasonable idea, but that would be a complete save to a new file, not incremental I think.

Incremental save means to have multiple copies of the original file, which is done automatically without the need to save a separate file manually. When a new save is done, it will then override older saved versions so they are reasonably up to date. You can determine how many incremental saves there will be. For instance, in Blender you have the original .blend-file, with incremental saves named as .blend1, .blend2, etc. Blender also calls the feature Save Incremental, so I call it as such.

[dominik]

6 minutes ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

Incremental save means to have multiple copies of the original file, which is done automatically without the need to save a separate file manually.

Basically I think is a good idea. I've seen this in other software I use and it occasionally save my ... life.

Problem with Affinity is that with some projects files can become quite huge. The time to save is not instant but can take a up to three seconds or more. This would interrupt workflow quite considerably. I'm not technically good enough to know if some kind of 'shadow copy' mechanism would work.

After all, if there is a way to implement this without interupting workflow I'm all for it.

d.

[Frozen Death Knight]

7 minutes ago, dominik said:

Basically I think is a good idea. I've seen this in other software I use and it occasionally save my ... life.

Problem with Affinity is that with some projects files can become quite huge. The time to save is not instant but can take a up to three seconds or more. This would interrupt workflow quite considerably. I'm not technically good enough to know if some kind of 'shadow copy' mechanism would work.

After all, if there is a way to implement this without interupting workflow I'm all for it.

d.

It would take the same amount of time as any other save. File size is not an issue here. Auto-save is a completely different feature separate from incremental saves. An incremental save without auto-save would be you manually saving, which then automatically creates the additional copy for you. Also, the point of incremental saves is that it is an option, a safeguard for people who want to avoid losing copious amounts of work. You don't have to use it if you don't want to.

[dominik]

1 minute ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

It would take the same amount of time as any other save. File size is not an issue here. Auto-save is a completely different feature separate from incremental saves. An incremental save without auto-save would be you manually saving, which then creates the additional copy. Also, the point of incremental saves is that it is an option, a safeguard for people who avoid losing copious amounts of work. You don't have to use it if you don't want to.

As I said, if it is not slowing down workflow I think this would be a good addition (as an option). I am saving my work all time even with different versions over time (basically a poor man's incremental save) because I was bitten with lost work several times.

d.

[Alfred]

6 minutes ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

You don't have to use it if you don't want to.

The problem with automatic saves, incremental or otherwise, is that they have a horrible habit of kicking in at the most inconvenient moment. It might be helpful to have an implementation where the user is prompted to choose whether to allow the save to proceed or to postpone it.

[walt.farrell]

My issue with the concept of automatic incremental saves is that the corruption often seems to happen during the Save operation. And until that is fixed, for important files I don't trust any Save until I have Opened the just-saved file. 

Perhaps if one of the incremental Saves was corrupt the next would be OK, but it's still risky, in my opinion. 

Really, they need to fix the issue that's corrupting the files in the first place.

[Frozen Death Knight]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

My issue with the concept of automatic incremental saves is that the corruption often seems to happen during the Save operation. And until that is fixed, for important files I don't trust any Save until I have Opened the just-saved file. 

Perhaps if one of the incremental Saves was corrupt the next would be OK, but it's still risky, in my opinion. 

Really, they need to fix the issue that's corrupting the files in the first place.

I mean... Sure. Fixing the file corruption is a given. However, incremental saves are done for the very reason that sometimes things do in fact break, whether it's crashes or corrupted files. Just because corrupted saves need to be fixed doesn't change that incremental saves more often than not help bypass faulty software malfunctioning.

You basically have two alternatives here. You can have your single copy fail which will lose you several hours if not days/weeks/months of work if you haven't remembered to do a secure manual copy. Alternatively, your latest copy and also multiple incremental saves are corrupted, but at least one of them actually work. At most you lose some time having to wait for a back-up save to be done. Losing minutes vs losing hours.

Whole productions have been saved because of back-ups having been made. One such example being Toy Story 2, which was saved only because one person happened to have had a back-up after having worked from home. Objecting to what is a pretty standard feature in many software productions is quite frankly ridiculous.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

You basically have two alternatives here.

Until the basic corruption problem is solved, for really important work I would use a manual Saving process. It's complex, and annoying to have to depend on it, but it should ensure that there is a usable backup.

1. Starting with a document named X1, first Save As X2. At this point you don't know if X2 is good or not. So, also Save As X3.
2. Open X2. If it Opens successfully, close the document tab for X3 and keep working in X2. You have X1 as your backup.
3. When it's time to save again, first Save As X3. Then Save As X4. Open X3. If it Opens successfully, close the document tab for X4 and keep working in X3. You have X1 and X2 as backups that are known to be good.
4. Etc.

But yes, eventually when Saving is working better, incremental backups would simplify all this.

In addition to the incremental backups, perhaps there should be an optional part of the process that, after the incremental save is done, tries to Open the file in the background. If the Open is successful, the backup was good. If it's not, perhaps warn the user at that point.