autosave wipes out manual save

someoneTookMyName wrote on 3/8/2012, 10:51 AM

I do not appreciate losing 20 hours of work: I had explicitly saved my project and shortly after VMS (build 295) froze (much too common).

When I reopened VMS it asked about recovering the autosave, but I didn't think I really needed that, since I had saved just before the crash. Guess what, when I attempted to reopen the project I was working on it came up with a version from 4 days ago!

What happened to the project save? Why wasn't my original project saved when I asked it to? Why did by passing the auto recovery mean losing all me work?

This really is not very professional. Save means it is saved. Autosave in every other piece of software I've ever used means saving a copy, which is not the same as saving the original.

Very unhappy camper,

Comments

DocSatori wrote on 3/8/2012, 12:12 PM

I don't have a solution. I just want to concur. It's really not intuitive what's going on when you open a project you thought you'd saved - and are asked some vague/ambiguous message about some 'autosaved' version. And it seems to be happening more often. I suppose I'm intelligent enough to sit down and figure out what's going on - but there's already enough to learn, and real work to get done. The relationship between back-up files, saved files and 'autosaved' files needs to be clearer in the dialog boxes at the time of use. Sorry about your lost productivity someoneTookMyName. If I get a spare moment, I'll try to work out the technical aspects of what's happening to protect myself better.

vkmast wrote on 3/8/2012, 1:04 PM

Just as a reminder, this is from VMS Help:

Automatic Project Saving

someoneTookMyName wrote on 3/8/2012, 3:12 PM

Yes, finally did find the ...vk.bak files, but the weren't in my project folder, they were up the apps area.

Jack S wrote on 3/8/2012, 4:05 PM

Are you selecting the project file from the list of files shown under Exit in the project tab. These are not updated after a crash so the top one will be the last save before an orderly shutdown of the program. This is probably why an older version opened up. I never trust this list of files. I always select the Open option and browse to my project folder to get the last project saved.

BTW. I've had numerous crashes and never has the autosaved file overwritten my saved files. The autosaved files have completely unique names.

MSmart wrote on 3/8/2012, 6:47 PM

@someone, seriously consider doing a Save As every 15-20 minutes or so, giving your project name a version number. That way you have the ability to go back to a "known good" version. It's not hard for me to get my version numbers up into the 20's before finishing a project.

someoneTookMyName wrote on 3/15/2012, 12:06 AM

I will do that -- but my opinion of this software is drastically dropping as something I take for granted in photo editing software (Lightroom), and programming environments such as Visual Studio is so poorly implemented.