And sometimes “Save as Copy” when saving internal images
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Or for half-assed file management with versioning, set up google drive, or some other cloud storage solution. It’s not nearly as robust, but it works for file recovery in a pinch.
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I know what you feel, and I’m sure many people experienced the same things.
I agree that blender can have some option to better help users.
I see how useful this can be, personally, not having to click ok every time I save a file is quite a time saver and something that I like very much. But having it as an option won’t kill anyone.
But as said, this work needs concentration and organisation, and it only get worse when working professionally.
Dealing with all the files a project can need, all the versions according to client changes, and dealing with the complexities of a project, that’s something you’ll have to learn if you want to get to a certain level.
I don’t think it’s only blender that’s at fault. I’ve seen people raging over Maya, Nuke, AfterEffect… , it’s a third of the software being weird in it’s own way, a third of the complexities of the project, and a third of user mistakes, all that leading to a 100% :
A professional will avoid many mistakes, but they append. On every project I worked on there is always someone deleting or overwriting a file. For that some backups with some sort of versioning are needed.
We have things like sanity checker that looks for mistakes, some automation to help name files correctly. A lot can be done to avoid mistakes, and you may look into that yourself.
But truth is, and that’s something I witnessed myself, if an artist is not organised and concentrated in the first place, he’ll always manage to make a mess on a regular basis, even with all the custom security belts we can offer.
I think, to do well in this job, one as to remember that a good part of the job is fun and creative, another good one is boring. Organizing your work, dealing with clients/director/supervisor notes, troubleshooting a scene, deliver on time, and even correct other mistakes when doing teamwork. All that is part of the job as much as the good part. For a hobbyist you can avoid some of them, but if you plan to be a professional you’ll have to cope with all that as well.
Someone can like basketball very much, but to go to a certain level he’ll need to have a good diet, do some exercises avoid partying too much. There is always a good and a boring part to everything…
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On the lack of notifications, it is a bit of a double-edged sword in that there are advantages and drawbacks to both ways.
Not having dialogues at all in favor of transparent warning colors means you can get things done faster, but at the cost of possibly overwriting or deleting something by accident if you are not aware of what is on the screen.
Reworking Blender to be filled with dialogues meanwhile will make it much more difficult for novice users to make errors that cause a loss of work, but eventually you will become a more advanced user and scream at how Blender assumes you are using the app. for the first time. I do recall Microsoft upping the dialogue action a lot when Windows Vista was released, which only led to power users complaining how the idiot-proofing made it assume they did not know how to use a computer. The best that can be done is a balanced method that uses dialogues only for things that would not come up too much (like quitting Blender and you did not save).
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It is not ideal as having a boat anchor deploy whenever your car reaches over 70 Mph kinda not ideal.
Yeah good idea! If I can find a way to setup Windows to prevent overwriting files but allowing to write new ones. I’ll look into that.
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The auto saves and backups are good and used often. But no backup for texture files.
I work on a machine that is not connected to any network.
I’ve been using it since 2009 but I decided for the last couple of years that I will make my animations just with Blender. In the past it was props and characters to export to other animation software.
Yes ! great idea ! Depending on how geeky you are some tools are interesting.
Thing is, I don’t know much simple and effective solutions that an individual can use.
At some point, I used SVN which is awesome, basically you save snapshots of your project, and you can access and restore past files. But it’s manual, you decide when you want to save files.
At work I used Seafile, that allow file sharing backup and history. Here it’s automatic so every change you made are stored and you can easily restore a file. But it’s a bit involved to setup.
You may look for a windows equivalent of Time Machine, that automatically save each changes you made to a folder, maybe that :
https://www.portableone.com/Tech-News/Microsoft-Windows-10-PCs-have-their-own-Apple-Time-Machine-feature#:~:text=As%20mentioned%20earlier%2C%20File%20History,that%20you%20want%20to%20restore.
Well, yes, “Windows-10 finally came on board.” But, in typical Microsoft fashion, they made it hard and obscure, where Apple always just made it simple and obvious.
If Blender omits an “overwrite this file?” dialog where you think there should be one, just submit a bug-report to the developers.
hahaha, it’s not a bug but a feature request… Filling a report for that will just waist developers time IMO.
And it’s quite debatable if this is the right way to go, the function is doing what you’re telling it to do… I save on a regular basis and would be quite annoyed to click OK every time. But I can see why people might want a warning.
One should be careful of what he is doing, some operation are safe, other have some risk of loosing data or can’t be undone. Every time we do these operations we should be cautious, just as in real life.
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So the obvious solution then would be to provide a checkbox to always prompt on save.
…then we can argue over whether this feature should be opt in or opt out.
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I’m not aware of software, present or past, that requires confirmation every time you save. Why reinvent the wheel?
Most software has actually gone in the other direction, with auto-saves that require no work from the user. Software should be easy to use, the more work a user has to do to do a task, the less likely they are to use that software. It’s UX Design 101.
If a user has to disrupt their work to confirm a prompt every time they save, most users won’t use the software. “Interrupts” are the greatest detriment to user experience and the fastest way to lose a user. I took some UX classes in college, and I work as a web developer and designer. In my (admittedly limited) professional experience, anything that could be an interrupt could be better UX and do the same thing if it wasn’t
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The unfortunate thing though, is that the BF is apparently not allowed to receive credit for stumbling on a good idea ahead of its time because it is a FOSS organization. Look at the sculpt thread on the innovations Pablo brought, it is actually Pixologic that receives credit for inventing the cloth/fabric brush and other things as if Blender was still that rinky-dink free app. that does not even have undo.
FOSS does something first and professionals question why it should even exist, then Autodesk or some other commercial company implements their own version (with marketing to match) and suddenly they praise the idea.
Yes, I am aware that the first to market does not always give the best implementation of a feature, it is more about giving credit where credit is due.
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It’s not black and white situation here !
I think many people find blender quite innovative nowadays ! Also the ideas goes both sides. Pablo brought many ideas from Z-Brush into Blender, that’s fair they want to bring his ideas into Z-Brush as well.
If they do something better with it, then their ideas will maybe make it into blender at some point.
Sometime Blender is the last one to incorporate something (UDIM) sometime they’re the first to provide something quite new (Grease Pencil) .
I’m sure people get the big picture that Autodesk doesn’t care that much about their software and their users and they are more about making the most money possible. While Z-Brush , Houdini, Blender are quite innovative software that care for users. We can get that by just listening to users talking about them.
I tend to agree with @joseph that auto-save is maybe a better solution rather than interrupting users each time they save something. But maybe having that as an option is a goal more easier to reach.
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It’s like with every tool you use… a knife for example… there shouldn’t be any finger between the knife and the chopping board… but how many times you have cut yourself? Or even stumbled about you own feet?
If you are using Windows (other OSes may have much the same feature), you can setup File History. Many older web guides will talk about connecting an external (USB) drive to store the history, but you can install/use a second hard drive (SATA/M.2) on your system for Windows to write all the files.
Not sure if the back up drive gets formatted or if you can pick a folder on it for File History and store other stuff manually as well. Test on an empty drive first just to be safe.
You should be able to adjust the frequency, down to like every 10mins, so worse case, instead of losing 8 hours of work, you would only had to redo the last 10-20mins.
You can of course use things like NAS units, etc to do the same thing, or yes, ‘The Cloud’’, depending on your Internet connection.
Don’t you tell me how to live my life! 
There is a valid point in that this can be confusing.
Blender is not like an image editor (gimp/Photoshop etc) or many other programs where you work on one file and save it.
In one blender file you can create many new images for textures, masks, bakes and of course final renders, which need to be saved separately.
Internally blender will give new texture images a unique name/data block (untitled – untitled.001 etc) even if you do not save them.
If you add 3 image texture nodes and hit new in each one and do not give them names (leaving the default “untitled”) blender will add suffixes to keep the data blocks separate.
In the case of renders the name is “render result” and Blender always “overwrites” the “render result” data-block.
When using the image browser, with a particular image on screen, it would be more logical that when you hit save the name of that particular image’s data-block appears as the file name to save, instead of the name of the last image you saved.
Personally I always make a point of giving unique, valid, understandable names to all images, objects, collections etc But I can understand the frustration of the OP.
It is a bit like the Wait! You can't just press Render Animation thread, in this case Wait -you -cant-just-hit-save! 
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