Why is there no autosave? [suggestion]
Dafa
Posts: 97
This is a question while also suggesting adding an autosave feature. If this post doesn't best match the category, mods please change it not delete it, thanks!
It is so amazing that this awesome 3D software doesn't have an autosave feature. Like come on, my DAZ Studio crashed 6 times while I was rendering various animations and I, unfortunately, forgot to save the minor but time-consuming adjusts. This is very annoying where a "fatal error" occurs and there's nothing you can do to try and save your works.
It is too much to ask to create an options menu in the DAZ Settings dedicated to Autosave? Why hasn't this been implemented into DAZ for such a long time? My suggestion, since people have different opinions on which they set the autosave timer, just have it as an option. Also, DAZ should automatically save prior to rendering an animation, simulating, running scripts, etc. If implementing an autosave causes slight performance issues, I'd think it's worth it. I'd rather be slowed down, knowing that I have a wonderful autosave feature that's got my back rather than painfully losing lots of work unexpectedly.
Devs/Mods if you are reading this, please please please please please.... add a backup/auto-save feature in your next stable DAZ Studio release.
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Comments
This is qute often suggested, though that doesn't stop you from making your wn feature request through https://www.daz3d.com/help/help-contact-us . I think a major concern may be the time it would take to save, and Daz may be reluctant to allocate resoruces to a project that might well be risky/time consuming (because of the need to make sure it played nicely with other features) if there was judged to be a good chance many people would simply turn it off.
I would scream if DS started "autosaving" for five or ten minutes while I'm trying to get something done.
Use the ctrl+S keyboard shortcut for save. Better than any autosave.
Autosave doesn't have to be a dumb timer. A smart autosave waits until there's a period of zero mouse/keyboard activity before firing off. It also shouldn't trigger while your rendering a scene or doing other intensive things like that.
Just like a screensaver shouldn't kick in while you're typing in a Word document, or your computer shouldn't start to defrag itself while playing a game.
Sure. And also if it can be turned off, then it won't even affect me, so I'm not against it (if it can be turned off). But learning to save frequently is essential with everything in the 21st century. So that should always be the first step.
This - also I may not want to save the changes I made.
That, at least, is usually handled by saving to a temp file rather than overwriting the main file.
So would I but then I would (and do) also scream if I forget to save and 2 hours work goes poof! Perhaps create a temp file every so often that saves the state of play but doesn't overwrite the "official" save? Then you might have a choice to either restore the last save or the most recent temp file.
[Oh, Richard got there before me]
I don't understand why there are people against this feature. Just about every other modern application has it. You'd be pissed if your homework or accounting spreadsheet was lost because autosave didn't exist in the software you're using, but nobody every complains about autosave in Office.
It's common sense that the feature should have 1) the option to be turned on or off, 2) the timer set to the desired frequency, 3) it doesn't save over your originals. This is just normal. It would be even better for it to sense idle time, or have incremental saves, or at the very least have the ability to rebuild your scene from a file that doesn't save any of the assets within it because it only saves changed parameters.
Please, get off the "it would interfere with my work" high-horse and come up with a solution. It's clearly obvious that this feature is strongly desired by a subset of users.
Also, please request it via Feature Request ticket and ask for all the options mentioned above.
Office doesn't autosave for ten minutes, during which time you can't use the program.
Uhhh... what? Autosave is set to 10 minutes by default. You can change it, and you can turn it off (it's in the options, go check it out). And what do you mean, you can't use the program? Autosave works in the background, and there's no reason why DAZ can't be made to do the same. Again, what's with the negative attitude on this forum? Is there no room for improvement in this software? Is there a Union Workers Against Autosave I forgot to get an invitation to? My goodness.
Mudbox has an "increment and save" feature. It adds a .000x to the filename. This on a shortcut would be more useful than one that overwrites the current file. I'd hate an automatic save feature and some scenes take quite a long time to write, especially when you have lots of props and animation in the scene.
The issue is that DS takes a lot longer to save, at least for complex scenes. And that seems to be data preparation, writing to disc doesn't take that long, so a background save would still require that the data be prepared for writing - during which the application would presumably have to be unresponsive to avoid any state chnages that would cause the buffered data to be inconsistent with itself.
A feature request is something you consider with a future design, not a current design. Stop trying to use current operations as a reason to not implement a future solution. If that is the way everyone worked, then we'd never would've seen dforce implemented because DAZ is just a posing modeler, right? Go use blender or Marvelous Designer for cloth sims! C'mon, do better than this, people. If you have nothing constructive to add to a feature request, then just let those who are interested contribute. Nay sayers be damned.
Consider also this: Autosave could be set to kick in when starting a render, loading a new asset, running a simulation, user idling or while using another application (many of us use several applications such as blender, photoshop, zbrush, etc. while working), and probably a dozen other significant events. If your system is impacted negatively by autosave, then DON'T ENABLE IT, simple as that. Some of us have extensive hardware such as multiple GPUs or SSDs which allow us to work faster because our TIME is worth MONEY and thus money is lost when work is lost.
Everyone is intitled to their opinion and no one has the right to try and shut them up, this is a public forum. If you want the feature then request it but don't make threads aand posts then get upset if everyone doesn't agree with one point of view.
Please remembver that a forum thread is not a feature request - it's an opportunity to discuss the subject, or to learn that in fact there is already a way to do that. Once you feel you are ready to make a request, with or without forum discussion, you need to do so via a Technical Support ticket.
As for saving on render, I thought someone had already written a script that would do that - save, then launch the render with current settings. If not it should certainly be possible. Then you just make that a custom action and assign cmd/ctrl-r to launch it.
I would be happy if they merely saved the do/undo list since the last save. Surely that would be significantly faster than a complete save, get rid of the need to have a file name and they already have a do/undo feature. Just append each action into a file, then dump the actions file when you gracefully exit the program.