I’m running a small studio where multiple people use the same iMac computers (at different times throughout the week) to work on the same blend files.
This setup occasionally causes an issue with autosave.
As user A works on shot1.blend it gets autosaved to /tmp/shot1.blend
Great.
But if user B comes along to the same computer and works on shot1.blend, then autosave fails because user B doesn’t have permission to overwrite a file created (and thus owned) by user A.
Blender quietly prints an error message to the terminal window, but most users aren’t seeing it there.
So they only discover that autosave has been failing when a crash happens and they lose a bunch of work.
I’m aware that this could be solved by encouraging users to restart the machine (as that empties the /tmp/ folder), but it seems like asking for a full restart every time a user sits down at a machine is a clunky solution.
Has anyone else encountered this problem?
Am I doing something wrong?
Any ideas for a better solution?
You should choose a shared folder as autosave folder in the user preferences, the only caution to follow is to manually empty such folder periodically.
edit: BTW, the fact it doesn’t empty automatically on reboot, as the tmp folder does, can be useful to recovery your last work after a system crash or a forced restart.
I wonder if there is a way to launch blender from the command line with an option to set the autosave folder to the current user’s home directory. Maybe with a python script that sets the folder path.
That way students could double click on a little shell script and not have to worry about setting up their own autosave folder each time they sit down at a different workstation in the lab.
I didn’t understand that you need to have a separate autosave folders for each user, that’s easy, no need for a script.
User preferences are saved on “/Users/‘username’/Library/Application Support/Blender/2.xx/” so, if each user sets up his autosave folder in a place of his choice inside its own home folder, then all the personal autosaved files will go there.
Each user can do that in Blender User Preferences->Folder -> Temp
Otherwise, if you want every user can access to a common place and share his work with others, each user have to set the autosave folder to one same folder on a shared place on the machine.
That’s probably what I’ll do next semester.
It’s one more thing that I’m asking the students to remember to do, but it’s simple, straightforward and it gives them the tools to care for their own work. I like it.