Losing hours of work

Support Basics & Interface
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There might be a workaround for this problem. There is a unofficial build with the Fullscreen button enabled. This button expands the screen by removing the window caption and buttons on it and therefor you will not be able to close Blender by accidently pressing the close button. This button was removed from the latest blender versions because it causes problems with ATI graphics cards.

Maybe it works for you, he’s the link:
http://www.blender3d.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7350&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=&sid=548463671587390db48acec6286bc394

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If you had read the whole thread you’d probably know by now I was using computers probably before you were born.

The only person to blame is yourself. However agreived you are, it isn’t the application that’s at fault and argueing as to whether you have a pop up or not is pointless.

Completely false argument. If it were an argument in the first place. Just an opinionated statement. If my lack of ability to remember to save is partly to blame, so is the lack of a save dialog. The lack of a save dialog is a stupid oversight at best, and probably something much worse, since the topic apparently has been discussed. And if arguing whether to have a popup is pointless, that’s a failure of the devs to listen to reason; not my failure to accept a wrong.

What are you going to do when an application bombs out on you, are you going to expect a pop up ‘sh-t I’m gonna crash do you want to save your work’

If the app crashes, the app crashes. Sh-t happens. But there’s no need to add to it the fact that the app closes without a question.

Read the installation instructions, ensure you’ve set the application up correctly, setup the autosave and then start work. Save your work regularly.

Thanks for the good advice. I still see no reason why the app couldn’t ask if I want to save, when I accidentally hit the close button, just like any other app would, and with much less at stake than original content creation. Auto-save is good; but it should be a last resort; NOT something one needs to tap on on a regular basis. Auto-saves are still dangerous for the reason that was mentioned earlier: The possibility of overwrites.

Although Blender is considered stable your PC may not be and I’ve crashed Blender many times just selecting an edge of a mesh and my PC’s are rock solid stable.

As I said, just because the possibilites of power failures and crashes exist, it doesn’t mean that another possible way to lose your work, and a more likely one at that, shouldn’t be approprietly controlled by the app.

Sounds a bit harsh, i don’t mean it to be. Good luck with
Blender.

Sure, of course you didn’t mean to be harsh!
Love it when people insult you and then say “no offense”…

@SoftWork:
Thank you; I would have missed your post if I hadn’t come back to edit mine; seems we posted at the same time. I’ll check that out for sure.

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yellow: If you’ve been hanging around the forums you know my stance on personal attacks. chuck_starchaser’s argument is valid, clearly stated, and correct. Don’t ignore it and attack him. It won’t fly.

It is the application that is at fault (or more correctly, it is the application’s design that is at fault).

Not just among individual OSs, but across all GUI computing platforms there is a standard by which most users define their interaction with the computer. When any program breaks this convention it invites disaster. Blender is perhaps the only non-standard interface design I know of that is successful in a large number among a non-technical consumer base.

I personally like it, but it is not without its flaws. It is through civil, open discussion that we, the user base, have the unusual opportunity to improve Blender.

You may disagree, but you’ll need either hard facts or at the very least your own personal reasons for it. Attacking another as naïve is not a valid argument.

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Update: It just happened again ^^. Exact same way, tried to close the render window and hit Blender’s close button instead, after about 2 hours since my previous save. So, I said “Okay, calm down: Now the auto-save is working…”. I opened Blender again, Recover From Last Session, but the file was at least 45 minutes old, not 5 minutes like it’s supposed to be. My autosave is set for 5 minutes, so I don’t quite get what’s going on…

I downloaded that full-screen patch, but haven’t tried it yet. The problem I forsee with full screen is that I’m constantly Alt-Tab-ing between Blender and Gimp, to inspect matching between my model and the original art. This pic is a few days old WIP but it’ll give you an idea. The left half is the original 2D art from Wing Commander. The right half is my model. Keep in mind this is my first Blender project ever.

http://www.deeplayer.com/dan_w/hellcat/cockpit34.jpg

Now, that wire on the left side, running along the frame, is what I’ll have to do now for the third time… So, the justice of the situation, the way I see it, is that because a few people dislike a popup when the app closes, someone like myself who really needs it has to suffer hours and hours of lost work, week after week…

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I’ve had the same problem as you and the autosave has saved me many times but it didn’t in a few instances. While I agree that the popup with the option not to use it should be in there I would highly recomend training yourself to save whenever you make a change you’re going to keep :wink:

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The problem I forsee with full screen is that I’m constantly Alt-Tab-ing between Blender and Gimp, to inspect matching between my model and the original art.

Why not load the image as a Background in Blender?

Why do you have to close the renderwindow? Press Esc and it disappears to the background.

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GrayDog, like I’ve said, I’m an old dog. I can tell myself till I’m blue in the face “I must save”, “I must save”, but once I get into the work I forget. Simple as that. The ONLY times I remember to save, is when I’ve finished some part of the work, and wonder what I’m going to do next. Then, more often than not I think about saving. The problem I’m having now is that doing that wire is (for me) very difficult. The frame looks round but it isn’t; it is elliptical, and is tilted forward about 20 degrees, so first I copy part of the door-frame, tilt it up straight, then use spin to make the wire, then try scaling it and moving it until it just touches the frame along the entire surface, then delete the copy of the frame, move and tilt the wire to place it against the real frame, then start cutting and offseting and turning portions of it, rendering, comparing to the original art,… and then I hit close…

@SoftWork:
When I first started work on the cockpit, in fact, I had the image loaded as background. The problem is that the view on the image is with the camera tilted about 10 degrees down from the ship’s forward direction. So, when I started, I put the pic as background, and traced it; but after that I had to move all the tracings in 3D so that they would look so when looking down 10 degrees. My camera is tilted down by that angle. I could turn the whole ship up 10 degrees, I suppose; but I have a bad feeling about doing so.

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It’s an extra window in the sometimes-crowded-taskbar?

I also support the ‘are you sure you wanna quit’ window, with an option to turn it off, if that is what it takes.

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Exactly. I render like every 2 or 3 minutes. Every feature I change I hit F12. I have Gimp open with the original art scaled to 800x600, so I render, paste, and play with the Layers’ alpha slider…

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I opened Blender again, Recover From Last Session, but the file was at least 45 minutes old, not 5 minutes like it’s supposed to be. My autosave is set for 5 minutes, so I don’t quite get what’s going on…

The auto-save file(s) – you can retain more than one - have a different naming convention than quit.blend file created when you exit blender. It is the quit.blend file that the recover last seesion opens not the autosave files. Funny that the auto save doesn’t work though. Did you search for all the blend files on e: drive as Duoas explained last time or look in your new tmp directory?

Set up a garbage drawing and set the number of autosaves to 3 and at a 1 minute duration and play around for 5 minutes. While the program is running look in your e: mp directory and see if the autosave files appear. If they don’t - file a bug report and revert to 2.37a.

GreyBeard

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It’s an extra window in the sometimes-crowded-taskbar?

In Blender you can use several Screens. You can switch between these screens with Ctrl-LeftArror and Ctrl-RightArrow. You probably use only one screen for editing, so you can setup another screen to display your reference image:

  • press Ctrl- -> or Ctrl- <- to go to another screen
  • Change the window type to UV/Image editor
  • Load the reference image in this window
  • press Ctrl- <- or Ctrl- -> to go back to your modeling screen.

You don’t need to have Gimp open anymore, which also saves some RAM.

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Could I suggest you change the position of your render window so it doesn’t compete with your main window close buttons? In your Scene (F10) window there is a small group of 9 buttons in the bottom left corner. Each button determines where your render will be positioned (You can choose two to average the position.)

I would recommend you set a new position as the default.

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Uh… no, I didn’t; I thought the safest thing would be to use recover from the menu… I just took a look at E:/tmp and there’s a 3 minute old file, so I guess auto-save IS working. Okay, next time I close Blender, I’ll check which file is the latest. I’ll set up for 5 autosaves, every 2 minutes, also.

Thanks, everyone; you’ve all been very helpful, as always. Time for me to go hit the sack. Been Blendering since yesterday around 6 am (it’s 12 40 pm now), so about 30 hours straight. Come to think of it, maybe it’s a good thing one loses work… If the interface didn’t suck, Blender might be more addictive than Wing Commander… :smiley:

Cheers!

EDIT:

SoftWork: The reason I use Gimp is to play with the alpha blend between the original and my render. I have 2 edit windows set up. Memory is not a problem; I have 1 gig, and never even went below 500 megs free.

AndyD, you’re a guru of gurus; that’s probably THE solution. Million thanks.

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But the point was it doesn’t remove the window from Windows’ taskbar. Only rendering with DispView does.

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I know how you feel chuck, I often times start a full screen render or animation, and its taking to long so i hit escape to stop the render(yes i know how to make the render smaller, i shouldnt have to),and go to close but its prossecing something so the render window doesnt go away, even if i wait, so i hold close to make sure it registers the command, but only to have it go away a split second before i hit it, and having blender up right behind it… you get the rest. i feel like a bum steels my food just as im putting it in my mouth. atleast a warning before it closes completly! but the autosave works so im content for the most part.

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Are you 100 % sure everything is gone ???
It happened to me once but i was able to find some trace of the work somewhere…
In fact in my Blender Foundation directory (Win XP), there are hundreds of .blend files with apparently random numbers… If i open one, i find some work i did recently…
I have a tmp folder just below the root D:// that i haven’t created myself, and the autosave makes me a copy of the file iam working on in the same directory the file is from every 3 minutes…

Have you had a look in the Blender Foundation directory ?

And about Andy’s solution: exactly. Do that. I 've moved mine too just for that reason…
I agree that this “Ask before quiting” popup should be available for whover misses it, even if i’d turn it off myself.

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This thread is from 2005, chuck_starchaser’s last activity was june '07. Please don’t bump redundant threads Jolibra.

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