So, Blender just randomly closed on me. I did some work around noon and had it open until the evening, continued work for over an hour just now then it closed. Didn’t save since noon. Tells me it got an autosave from 7:17 pm, Blender closed just after that. When I open it it’s just the file from the last time I saved. All the work I did since then is not there. How does blenders autosave work? Does it even autosave because that save is just my save i did hours ago even though it apparently created that autosave file recently. How often does Blender autosave?
Maybe I’m not looking in the right place, where can I find the autosaves? I’m just going by File > Recover > Autosave.
Thank you!
First of all, go to Edit - > Preferences, in Save & Load tab, you can find how many times does Blender saves your project and set the time interval of it:
As for the question of where you may find your auto save, you got it right, it’s in File → Recover → Autosave. There you may find all of your autosaves files:
If it’s not work, try Last Session instead.
P.S. In File Paths section you can set the temporary folder path in which your auto save files will be saved
I have autosave enabled and the timer is set to two. That means every 2 minutes it creates an autosave I assume. And i also assume it only creates one autosave file and overrides it every 2 minutes then.
The autosave that I have says was from about 2 minutes ago before blender closed or 7:17 pm yet when I open it it’s a save from hours ago.
So that isn’t normal then?
Under temporary files in preferences there’s no location selected. Is that a problem?
Yes, you’re right.
IDK about that, but maybe you’re right.
Try to find the file that has .blend1 extension. It should be in /tmp/ directory by default.
More about recovering files:
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/troubleshooting/recover.html
You may also try to load your scene from File → Open Recent:
Can’t seem to find a proper Blender folder on my pc, the one I find is empty apparently. Searched my computer for .blend1 files and there’s one of my project but from earlier today.
When clicking on recover earlier and then the autosave file from the project it didn’t save anything. Now the file has been overwritten because I had blender open for more than 2 minutes but even then it didn’t save any progress I’ve made when checking if it saved any this time.
So seems like autosave’s broken for me.
Thank you though for your help
Most likely, yes. Maybe it just didn’t save though.
I wonder why though? I believe I must’ve had the same issue then when I used blender on my laptop last year instead on this pc. Whenever I would try to recover autosaves it always looked as if nothing was saved but I thought maybe I was just imagining it and blender was just saving in larger intervals. But now i think autosave was indeed broken even on my laptop. Is it a 3.5 issue? I searched a bit on here and someone suggested it might be add-ons causing this issue but the only add-on I’ve enabled on this pc is Bool Tools which comes with blender.
The autosave is a hidden file in the same folder as the file you were working on. You need to show hidden files in your operating system
Its a good idea to occasionally go through and clear out all the old autosaves from finished files.
I enabled for windows to show hidden files, is it the .blend1 files to look out for?
They just contain the data of the last save, don’t seem to save anything I haven’t saved manually myself.
Yes that .blend1 file.
It you open the crashed file for two minutes it will save over the autosave.
Yeah I found out. Though the first time I checked up on my file I tried to open the autosave immediately that was located under Recover > Auto Save so the autosave couldn’t have been overwritten then.
Seems like autosave’s just busted.
That would not surprise me.
I had that happen to me in the past, and it was the fault of an add-on. I don’t remember exactly which one it was, but I started disabling addons in bunches, until I found a bunch that caused it, then I narrowed it down to one addon and disabled it. Never had an issue with autosave since then
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In the case of Windows, if you are on standby for a long time, some functions will be set to stop by the power management settings.
Maybe that’s why it wasn’t saved 
And the Tmp file is deleted at regular intervals.
It may be better to change the route and manage it.
Shit happens, I used to deal with the similiar problem some moons ago either. Well, the only thing you could do, instead of trying to find that auto-save is just start from the scratch where you stopped the last time. Just don’t forget sometimes to save your project manually instead of hoping that auto-save will do this for you. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.
Cheers,
Sergey
I was working on the file for over an hour just before blender closed, plenty of time for blender to auto save. But thanks for the info.
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I just redid everything, thank god it wasn’t to much. I’m saving way more now plus making back ups. Learned my lesson. Thanks for trying to help
I see, I have Bool Tools enabled so I could check if turning it off changes anything. I’m just gonna forget about autosave being a thing for now and save manually as much as possible. Thank you