Can automatic recovery be trusted?

[mroek]

While working on my current project I've had a few crashes of Fusion (but none of the interesting ones allowed for sending in a crash report). Fortunately I was offered to open the automatic recovery file (each time), and so I did. This has happened three or four times now, and on two of these occasions I've noticed anomalies. My auto recovery interval is set to 5 minutes. Now, the two anomalies:

• One time I lost data that was in a component that I had not touched for a long time. A whole string of features was lost, and it was so far back in time that I had to abandon that recovery and reopen my last saved version instead, as those features would have been a lot of work to recreate. That means I lost the latest features I had added (which was there in the recovery), and had to recreate those. I was most likely working with the timeline rolled back (but not to before the mentioned lost features) when this crash happened.
• The second anomaly happened while working at the very end of the timeline. I was trying to add a new feature (a presspull), and while doing that, autosave kicked in and made Fusion unresponsive for a short time (which is OK). When it "came back" I continued with the presspull, but I pushed it a bit too far and Fusion threw an error (something about not being able to repair deleted faces) and then crashed. Upon reponening I was offered the recovery, which I then opened, only to discover that the sketch I had edited before adding the presspull had lost most of it's content. This sketch was closed prior to the autosave kicking in, so it shouldn't have lost data, I think.

The latter of these cases isn't too bad, but I'm really concerned about the first one. How on earth could I lose design data that was far back in time? At first I didn't notice either, because the component that lost data wasn't visible (because I hadn't worked on it for a long time), so I actually did some more work before discovering the data loss.

Has anyone else experienced something similar? It makes me very wary about the automatic recovery, as in a large design it can be difficult to spot selective data loss.

[innovatenate · Accepted solution]

Auto-save is not a feature that should be relied upon 100%. This is an “emergency” feature that is designed to help minimize data loss in the event of catastrophic failure. It is not a mechanism that should be depended upon or considered a replacement for the Save command.

If Fusion 360 is actively working on a process (e.g. rendering, solving a simulation, using the edit form command, etc.. ) then the auto-save can be skipped. Instead of relying on auto-save, I would encourage the use a a lesser known feature forcing an auto-save to the recovery directory which does not sync with the cloud. To manually save a recovery version of a document use the keyboard command:

Windows:

CTRL+SHIFT+S

Mac OS:

CMD+SHIFT+S

See this Screencast for more detail on how this feature works. 

Here is how to access the saved recovery files.

I hope that helps. Let me know if you have any quesitons.

Thanks,

[mroek]

Thanks. I didn't know about the command to explicitly save recovery. Might prove useful.

However, I think I've inadvertently been hitting that secret "crash Fusion"-command a few times.  🙂