Suggestion: Add an option for permanent recovery files

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I don’t know if Technical Support is the right area to place this in, so feel free to move this topic to another area of the forum.

Anyway, this issue has been bugging me, so I’ve come up with a suggestion to help alleviate it:

An option for permanent recovery files

Currently, Blender’s recovery files (stored in either the T or tmp directory), are all stored temporarily and are cleared when the computer is shut down or restarted. This has one major weakness:

If the computer were to suddenly restart itself, you could lose everything that you have not saved. This forces you to recreate your work all over again. Another problem with this issue, is that if the power cuts out, the same thing happens because the autosaves are temporary, not permanent.

Can you see what’s happening here?

What I suggest, is that maybe if the user wants to, they can specify a directory within Blender that stores an extra set of recovery files that do not disappear when these instances occur, like when the computer is shut down in an unexpected way (e.g: power failure).

These files would have their names ending in “_backup” or “_recovery” followed by the .blend extension, and are overwritten at the same frequency Blender overwrites current temporary recovery files.

Unlike the temporary recovery files used after a crash, these files are not stored within the T or tmp directory, and are stored in a directory the user chooses (cannot be in a directory lower than /username). If the file directory is not chosen, Blender will default to creating a directory called “recovery files” in the username directory.

Unlike the temporary recovery files, Blender will delete these permanent recovery files if you go to “Delete Recovery Files” in the menu, in which Blender will warn you if you really want to do this, and if you confirm it, the recovery files are deleted.

As a last suggestion, This should maybe implemented in a way so Blender will first ask you if you would like to set up this permanent recovery file measure. Next time you start Blender, it will automatically detect the directory and no longer ask you.

What do you all think?

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I think there is absolutely nothing to discuss here since you can change the directory to whatever you want:

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Autosaves are overwritten by other autosaves of the same file though.

This is not a new feature by the way. It has been like that for as many versions as I can remember…

It might be helpful to see the documentation as well.

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Tmp folder location movement is a feature that has been supported for quite some time (before blender 2.7).

If the default setting is not set to tmp, you must manage the file yourself.
If you’re a beginner, it’s not easy. In this case, you’ll use a lot of storage. :thinking:

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If you read through the post, it specifically says about temporary autosaves and a crucial weakness within how they are cleared after the system shuts down. But permanent autosaves (autosaves that are separate from the temporary ones) would not be deleted after the computer is powered down due to being written to the computer’s internal drive like how .blend files are, except automatically.

While temporary autosaves are good for recovering from a crash, the main weakness here is that they cannot recover your work from a power outage, unexpected shutdown or reboot due to the fact that the temporary autosaves are probably stored in RAM.

To maintain permanence, a new set of autosaves will need to be written to the computer’s internal storage. This is what I meant.

RAM clears/refreshes itself once the system is powered off, possibly explaining why the autosaves are gone when this action takes place. I’m not sure how Blender writes its autosaves since they disappear upon shutdown, but I think RAM may be the reason why.

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If you move the directory, auto saves aren’t deleted even if the computer crashes.

Also, Blender default autosave is not great. Use PowerSave

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If you read the documentation, you can see it specifies:

Note that files in your temporary directory may be deleted when you reboot your computer (depending on your system configuration).

This is done by the OS, not Blender since by default the location is default OS temp location. Also this should not happen if the computer crashes since the OS doesn’t get to do that the way it may be set up to do during restart. If you change the folder, it remains after restarts and crashes.

It doesn’t have anything to do with RAM.

Certainly might be something worth considering and couldn’t hurt, but to be honest at least my personal experience has been quite OK with it for quite a long time, unless of course I mess something up myself(like copying preferences folder between Linux and Windows so paths don’t work)… I think I might have had 1 or 2 instances only where something happened during autosave with correct settings and one of those was power outage in the office :smiley: (What are the chances?..) but else than that the default auto save has been quite reliable for me for nearly a decade. It cannot be that bad…

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Ah, now I see. The /tmp folder is a directory which is cleared after the computer is shut down.

Whats PowerSave? Is it available for macOS?

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It’s an addon, yes it is