Autosave file didn't automatically open after crash

What is your operating system?
Windows 10 Home 64-bit v21H2 build 19044.1469

What is your Shotcut version (see Help > About Shotcut)? Is it 32-bit?
22.01.30, 64-bit AFAIK.

Can you repeat the problem? If so, what are the steps?
No. Shotcut crashed after selecting Automatic Display Method, and choosing not to restart it. Doing that after restarting it didn’t crash it again. When I did restart it, though, there was no option for loading the autosave. I had a couple of minutes of absolute dispair till I found this and was able to restore the latest working project version by opening the autosave file directly :grin:

Did you try to open the project you had previously saved? It does not automatically open what you last worked on. It only offers to restore the autosave for a saved project when you open the saved project. It only offers to restore an unsaved (Untitled) project upon startup. Also, it only autosaves every minute. Based on these parameters for how it works, I do not reproduce this.

See also the docs

Yes.

Yes, that’s what I expected.

It doesn’t offer to restore an autosave for a previously saved project?? :thinking:

Then you may want to update this doc page… Ha, you just did! :smile:

Happy to report I just had another crash (for jumping over a handful edits in the history), and the restore autosave dialog came up this time, and dutifully restored the last edited version.

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Yesterday, I had the same initial problem again. Shotcut didn’t crash, Windows did, and when I restarted it, reopened shotcut and the project, it showed me a old save. Fortunately then I already knew where to fish the autosave from, and all was well.

But, this led me to thinking: what’s the point of distinguishing saved from autosaved files anyway? At this day and age, pretty much all apps function within the paradigm that all work is always saved (even this forum app automatically saves all drafts, and automatically reloads them when I revisit the topic; it doesn’t need me to click a button to do that). In practice, this means that shotcut would (manually) save and autosave to the same file, so there’d never be any confusion.

Really bad idea.
I don’t want autosave to overwrite my manually saved project. Some time you do mistakes and mess things up or test stuff, you don’t want to have these mistakes overwriting you last good work on disk.

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Isn’t that what Undo is for?

Undo history is not saved, so if i close current messed up project without saving and re-open the project from disk, I am f**ked

Let’s say it was

It is not practical save all actions there has been done to project and a lot of actions in shotcut is not something you can undo yet, like filter changes. I will make the project file much greater and bloated.
I don’t know any desktop application there autosaves without making backups or separate files for the autosave, It is not just safe to do so.

How much so? My mlt files are only a few KB. How much bigger would adding undo history make them? 1 MB? Is that “bloated”?

Not “all actions”; only those that haven’t been undone (i.e. those that compose the final product).

Easy enough to remove filters, no?

Here is a use case for this suggestion, @TimLau.

I don’t know of any app that saves your work as you go along by automatically overwriting the file you are manipulating.

e.g. If you had a “letter template” file in an editor and edited it to (later) save a new letter you would not want the editor half-way through to “autosave” over the top of your template and destroy it.

Overwriting a file is an action that should only be done after a user has explicitly asked for that action to be performed.

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Truth be told, I nowadays mostly only use online apps (e.g. Google Apps), @Elusien. And they all work like that (perhaps bc of the ever present danger of losing connecttion). They work under the paradigm that all edits are saveable, and if one wants to make a new version of an existing file, a template say, then the user would start by making a copy of it, and working from there. There is a save function, but all it does is anticipate autosave. If you close the window, the browser, your device, there is no dialog asking whether you want to save before closing; next time you open the same file, you simply continue from where you stopped (and your undo history is still there).

Web app works that way, because they have to, but no desktop apps does and shotcut is a desktop app and it work like any other desktop app.

I don’t recall iMovie ever asking to save a project (does it?). It asks you to name it first time you close it, but after that, it’s always (auto)saved. Same with Davinci Resolve.

Davinci Resolve does not by default do auto-saves. You need to switch it on. There are 2 options and both can be selected concurrently.

  • Live Save does as you say, it overwrites your project file.
  • Project Backups does what Shotcut’s “autosave” does, but keeps multiple versions, so if necessary you can revert to a version that you had previously.
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