Autosave required

[AlanPickup]

I have just had an exception error which closed AFP and lost the work I had done in the last 30mins. Is there an autosave feature? if not is one planned?

 

Regards Alan P

[nwgat]

yeah autosave would be good for a beta app and in production when stable, you never know when computer crash or software crash

[walt.farrell]

In your Preferences, in the Performance Options section, you should have:

Quote

File Recovery Interval—sets the interval for saving temporary data for currently open documents, allowing a document restore to be offered at startup if the app develops a fault.

For me all the Affinity apps have defaulted that to 300 seconds, which means an autosave every 5 minutes. Publisher has the same option, but I have no idea if it's actually working.

[carl123]

A file recovery option is not the same as autosave and should not be relied on to protect your work.

You should manually save your work at regular intervals and also save to a new file name (Save as) occasionally, just in case your only working document gets totally screwed up.

The above is even more important when using any beta release for work you cannot afford to lose.

The file recovery option in the Affinity Apps should be considered as your last hope of "keeping your job" when you have worked all day on a document without saving it, and the boss has just noticed that your PC/Mac has crashed.  For me file recovery has only kicked in, in about 20% of the times the application has hung or crashed.

 

 

[AlanPickup]

Hi

Just to clarify, I am a advocate of regular saving and do this in production work. At the moment I am trying to learn Publisher as I have Designer and Photo and want to complete the suite. you will note that I stated 30mins work lost, this was something I have been working on for a few hours, mainly around learning how to do things in AFP and trying things out. Once I have developed a technique and checked whether this is documented in the Help menu, if not I make notes.

I have found Walts retrieval setting and noted this is set as mentioned, but obviously not something that is working at the moment, but still think autosave would be helpful.

[spidermurph]

Another vote for auto save.

[tymateusz]

yup, another vote for AutoSave - I have chosen "do not recover" by mistake and there is no way to get all the work back. 

[SaltyClownShoes]

The Affinity Publisher needs an auto save feature.  I wasn't even offered the option to recover the last 5 hours of work I just lost.... There needs to be an auto save feature like Serif X9 Had.  

 

 

[big smile]

+1 for auto save, especially because people are used to apps on mac & ios auto saving. 

[Patrick Connor]

On 3/23/2020 at 10:13 AM, SaltyClownShoes said:

The Affinity Publisher needs an auto save feature.  I wasn't even offered the option to recover the last 5 hours of work I just lost.... There needs to be an auto save feature like Serif X9 Had.  

@SaltyClownShoes

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums

We are very sorry about the work you lost. The Affinity range has an autosave (autorecover) function (default save 5 minutes) but unfortunately it was broken in the 1.8.2 release for all existing documents (works for brand new documents). 

This has been fixed in the current 1.8.3 betas available from the beta forums further down, and will be made live when the beta process is completed, hopefully this week.

[SaltyClownShoes]

1 hour ago, Patrick Connor said:

@SaltyClownShoes

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums

We are very sorry about the work you lost. The Affinity range has an autosave (autorecover) function (default save 5 minutes) but unfortunately it was broken in the 1.8.2 release for all existing documents (works for brand new documents). 

This has been fixed in the current 1.8.3 betas available from the beta forums further down, and will be made live when the beta process is completed, hopefully this week.

That is good to know, I just lost another 2 hours of work last night.  What happened to the recovery feature that the product had during the Beta (pre-release)?  At least during pre-release I was able to recover work in progress.  I have been getting better about saving more often but if I don't hit save while in the process of manipulating the document... and it hard locks.  You know what I'm getting at.  I appreciate the response all the same.  I will look for those Betas, didn't know I still had that option!

[Patrick Connor]

The beta installation is a side-by-side one (and requires the retail version to run up), so you can use the beta exclusively until 1.8.3 is formally released. The files are 100% compatible/interchangeable

[Patrick Connor]

As to the cause of your hangs and crashes I think you should make a new thread in the appropriate bugs forum, if you can find a recipe that is replicable

[SaltyClownShoes]

Patrick,

I am just happy that I thought to look on your forums for an answer.  I appreciate the response!  I have no idea what would be causing the crashes and hard locks (I experience both: CTD and application lock).  Affinity is not using more than 3.7 Gigs of RAM and is not displaying high processor utilization (at the time of the crash / lock).  Furthermore, the program runs smooth as silk when it is open.  I was running Serif X9 (prior to switching to the Affinity Beta, which ran amazing just had bugs naturally) on a Ryzen 1700 a year or two ago and it ran terrible.  I switched to an i5 9600 and it ran better (single threaded maybe?).  I am running on an AMD Ryzen 3600 right now, non over clocked.  The program behaves like it's got a memory leak or something.  Every 3-5 hours the program fails without warning.  

My use case is the creation of a new Roleplaying Game for fans, thus free / open source products not for profit.  They all tend to be multimedia heavy and I embed the graphics so I don't have to maintain endless linked libraries locally (could be an issue but Serif X9 was able to handle it, this should too).  I purchased Affinity Publisher, Design and Photo to have the entire suite and I bought the books as well to get more proficient.  I am my own publishing team and editor after all!  

 

Thank you for your time!  I already have the Beta up and running!

 

Justin    

Edited March 29, 2020 by SaltyClownShoes

[sara.craiggoodell]

Just to double check, if you're running v.1.8.2.620, there's no working autosave function for documents that had been previously saved, only unsaved ones? 'Cause I just lost about 10 hours of work because of a hangup.... I should probably save more often, I know, but Designer used to crash all the time on my old computer and I got spoiled by the functioning autosave. Also, if there really is no autosave in the 1.8.2 versions, how do I sign up for the 1.8.3 beta?

[Patrick Connor]

36 minutes ago, sara.craiggoodell said:

if you're running v.1.8.2.620, there's no working autosave function for documents that had been previously saved, only unsaved ones?

that is unfortunately correct.

36 minutes ago, sara.craiggoodell said:

'Cause I just lost about 10 hours of work because of a hangup....

Sorry

36 minutes ago, sara.craiggoodell said:

I should probably save more often, I know, but Designer used to crash all the time on my old computer and I got spoiled by the functioning autosave.

Hindsight regarding saving is great, but please do not rely on autosave...

36 minutes ago, sara.craiggoodell said:

how do I sign up for the 1.8.3 beta?

Any customer can download and install the free betas on any OS for which they have a licensed release copy. They install parallel to the release builds and have a beta icon. There are in threads  pinned to the top of the relevant beta forum, and also linked to in the last post in each of these threads to the current beta releases

• Windows Beta Release Notifications
• Mac Beta Release Notifications
• iPad Beta Release Notifications

[sara.craiggoodell]

Thanks. 

[Patrick Connor]

@sara.craiggoodell no problem, and Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums  

[Kimotei]

For mac, is it possible to run some kind of 3rd party app script that makes saves say every 15 minutes?

 

When I get really focused and excited about some work I sometimes forget to hit the save as commands.
 

I lost 3 hours of hard work yesterday. Full error crash when trying to open the Designer project in Photo. I was just going to do a crop before the final save of the day. After the crash, because I was in shock and frustrated anger I did the mistake of opening the last save and then I think I lost the autosave file. There is one autosave file found but it will not open. Unknown file.
 

Please please we need some proper safe autosave functions. It cant be that hard to implement such a simple script?

[carl123]

1 minute ago, Kimotei said:

Full error crash when trying to open the Designer project in Photo

Do you mean by using the File > Edit in Photo command?

[Kimotei]

Yes. This was version 2. something though, from last year. I updated to latest versions after this incident yesterday.

[carl123]

The File > Edit in... commands are still buggy, even in the latest versions

I have got in the habit of routinely doing a Save just before using them and have been glad I did on more than a couple of occasions

Serif needs some way to check that the file is successfully passed over to the other app before "letting it go" from the sending app

 

PS Can't help with your original question as I don't use Macs but someone else may know

[Kimotei]

Alright, thanks. I will try to remember saving more frequent next time! We say in Norway “burned child fears the fire” so hopefully I will remember. 😅
 

Before jumping between Designer and Photo is something I will remember now.

[walt.farrell]

16 minutes ago, Red Sands said:

It's a silly extra integration by the way. StudioLink should work in all directions.

File > Edit in... is not part of StudioLink, and pre-dates the Publisher-only StudioLink function.

[PaulEC]

13 minutes ago, Red Sands said:

It's a silly extra integration by the way. StudioLink should work in all directions.

StudioLink only enables limited functionality of Photo and Designer within Publisher. Edit In opens the file in the another app. so that all functions of the other app are available. (It's much easier than having to save the file and then open it in another app!) StudioLink is handy for quick edits, but Edit In is useful if you need functions not available using StudioLink.