crash work saving backup?

[borisplotkin]

I had the software crash on me and nothing saved?
Would it be possible to have temporary files so that if i do lots of work and didn't save there's a backup?
Thank you!

[rnorris]

A number of years ago I did experiment with an auto-save like feature - based on some inspiration from the Blender project - https://www.blender.org/ ; and of course ubiquitous office software like LibreOffice and MS Word.
Including some options like how often the auto save would happen, whether it is enabled or not and the recovery potential.

Which was kind of OK but IIRC I didn't quite complete it having a couple of outstanding issues. One being that the auto save may take a relatively 'long time' - a second or two - if you large project files (like me ~ 250MB+) and this save can't happen in the background - as currently there is no way to prevent conflict between your editing and the data used during the save.
Probably only a minor inconvenience for those with large files which would be rare.
This could be mitigated now there is tracking of the modified status, since there is no point auto saving when there are no changes!

But I think there was a greater issue, that I can't quite remember of the top of head - possibly something along the lines of how to handle multiple projects. Hopefully I haven't lost this code, so should be able to resurrect it and think about how to improve it into being good enough to include.

[rnorris]

The number of years ago... turns out to be 8!