How many time have you clicked out of blender or accidentally close the console window in blender and lost hours worth of work i know ive done it a bunch of times i was wondering how hard it would be for the devs to add in a feature like in MS word when you click x to shutdown the program a dialog box appears and asks if you are sure you want to quit
i know there is and auto save function but i can not get it to work properly mabe some one could help me out
The plan is to remove the console in the future, most of the console is allready implemented in blender. but a few things are missing i heard.
i’m pretty sure for 2.6 it’ll be removed 
my post has been moved to a different thread
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=116303
sorry about that
Almost never! but that’s just me being smug…
This has been asked about a million times, but here goes:
if you close blender normally it will automatically save a quit.blend. This can be found by using the "recover last session! command from the file menu…
depending on os, closing the console window doesn’t save this, nor does opebning another .blend file from within blender, so be careful there…
also if you are in the habit of opening many instances of blender, when you close each, each one will overwrite the quit.blend on exit so you’ll only get the last closed one with this method.
Autosave on linux saves to the tmp folder which gets cleaned up on restart and maybe when blender exits…
on windows it saves somewhere like !documents abd settings/username/applicationdata/56667874.blend or whatever…
you may think it isn’t working beacause you thought it would save over the “live” file?
the key to successful use of autosave is to point it a directory of your choosing in the “file paths” part of user preferences, that way you’ll always know exacty where to look for the backup files!
I’ve never lost more than five minutes of work in years, and then only through crashes!
thanks for the info
I will have to agree, but still, a save dialog is a MUST if a blender wants to consider itself a serious 3d app.
~I corrected your text! 
PS: Maya has a save dialog on quitting, and most of the time i click no “no” by reflex so it does me no good whatsoever!
Are you sure to be sure you are sure to quit ?
Know when you want to save and when you don’t …
Just save by yourself before you quit.
But ok , if it’s possible to turn it off , why not …
Peace.
oh me too, but no it was not a personal opinion (personally I do not give a damn, I always save my work every 5 minutes under different filename) just a very basic rule from good PR … and if good PR helps bring more people to blender and thus more developers … well then it is a good thing, right ?
Why stop there?
A 3DS Max GUI is a MUST!
Wizards are a MUST!
Linus Torvalds once said: If you treat your users like idiots, only idiots will use your software.
I would say to Mr Linus that intelligence is highly overrated and highly subjective. I vote for extremely stupid friendly software…
After years of using much flakier programs than Blender, I have developed a Ctrl-S tourettes.
It’s a disease worth acquiring. It’s certainly saved my ass in Maya, which can randomly crash, with nothing so civilised as a pop up dialogue.
(BTW I don’t know how they pull it off, but Adobe’s “last chance to save a copy” dialogue that pops up when AE crashes is actually pretty useful. Be nice if it simply didn’t crash, but this is the next best thing.)
Comments like this make me wince.
If Blender was the only program that anyone would ever need to use for any purpose ever… then it might be forgivable to quit without giving the user a chance to save their changes. But people build up expectations for how software works through their use of many programs. It is wrong to break those expectations and blame the user.
you don’t know how unbelievbley some people are against this; its like Blender is some kind of strange attractor for people who hate save before quit dialogs. you are far less likely to be flamed asking for a full 3dmax interface clone than for a save before quit dialog.
I have gotten burnt so many times over this, so much so that now I just quietly grumble away like Oscar the Grouche perplexed at why such a simple thing causes so much drama.
Here is my two cents save yourself the trouble don’t ask for a save before quit dialog there are far more productive uses of your time… like drinking beer; flirtling with girls; watching football(soccer) matches, chatting with friends, actually making art with Blender. Just don’t waste you time trying to fight this lost cause.
But it does save anyway. That’s even better than asking the user whether he wants to.
If you have ever been to Amsterdam, you’ll know there will be times when you are drunken or stoned enough to lose control and close windows by accident. In a condition like that you would probably lose your work anyway, even if there was a confirmation dialog. At this point it makes perfect sense to switch Blender to auto-pilot mode and save the project file to a location where you won’t find it until you are sober again. It’s the ultimate user-friendliness!
Just don’t waste you time trying to fight this lost cause.
Even if i’ll not use this , i’m sure it’ll be added in the code.
There’ve been too much talk about this , new users whinning to have it , i’m sure the devs won’t let them down…
Peace :-).
Put this script into your .blender > scripts > ui folder.
Here is the new interface:
When you press exit button, confirmation dialogue appears:
This is a temporary solution.
you wanna bet on this, I wouldn’t call myself I new user but I still whine about this because; and this is strictly my opnion; this is one of those common sense things to have like seat belts or condoms.
I was actually given a technical reason as to why this is not so easy to implement in Blender by one of the devs. I hope I don’t butcher the explaination as I repeat it. The thing with the save before quit dialog is that in order for it to work you need to find out whether there was any change to the file between the last save and you exiting a program before throwing up said dialog. The problem with Blender is that there is no good way of finding out if the were any changes made between a last save and an exit. Meaning the safe way of doing things would be to popup said dialog regardless of when you saved which defeats the point of a save before quit dialog.
my opnion don’t hold your breath this won’t happen my solution currently is a bright lime green post it note that I stick on my monitor reminding not to be an idoit anymore and save every five minutes espically when using Blender.
@demohero cool script though that is more of confirm exit dialog than save changes before quit dialog. So will your script work even if one uses the manual to exit because I know that in some of the 2.4x builds that a similar dialog will popup if you use CTRL+Q to quit instead of the closing with the ‘X’ icon or the through the manual.
Firtstly… the safety features (like condoms if you must) are already there, the problem is that the new user doesn’t know about them… (hence my firtst post in this thread)
The thing is,technically it’s only hard to implement this dialog if you ONLY have the dialog if changes have been made to the scene…
Maya doesn’t know if changes have been made or not, so just throws the dialog up anyway… Just in case!
… which is what makes you get in the habit of saying “no” … open maya (default scene) and go to open another file… it asks if you want to save the default scene! EVERY TIME… so whenever you see that dialog you get in the habit of closing it… “no” which means when you do use it you really wish there was a quit.mb !
Personally i hope someone does add this feature, I’m all for freedom and choice… hopefully the dialog will have a link to the manual “autosave and Quit.blend” section as well! (and of course it should have the obligatory checkbox for “show this on exit” or whatever so it’s easy to disable for those of us that find blender safe enough as it is now.
Every 3d job I’ve worked in someone somewhere has had a poster saying “save as ya go!” in big letters around there workstation somewhere.
And that sort of relates to another unfortunate by-product of the “Would you like to save before you exit” system… There’s a fairly large population out there that, thanks to those ever-present dialogues, think that’s how you save. It’s a really disturbing experience the first time you see someone quit a program in order to save their work.
I like Blender’s system in this regard as it promotes being thoughtful about saving. Why are you quitting if you haven’t saved? If you don’t know if you’ve saved, why don’t you know?
As for the condom/safety-belt analogy, I just have some difficulty seeing it. To me, it’s more like having your trousers ask you if you’ve wiped your bum before you pull them up. They really shouldn’t have to ask.
But each to their own.