Autosave Behavior is Outright Frustrating

[TECrobotics]

Autosave never has recent files. They're always hours or days old, often right after the last real save, making them next to useless

I often have one project I'm working on, printing them and making changes all day. I usually save when I export stl files, but often I'm just caught up in the work. Inevitably the program crashes, and despite having autosave turned on for 5 minute intervals, there's almost never a recovery file that helps me. I don't actually need a file saved every 5 minutes, but it seemed like the only way to try and make it happen regularly. Doesn't help.

suggestion:

Autosave every X minutes, forced, guaranteed, even if I have to wait for it, so they're definitely there, and ONLY delete them IF the backup folder reaches a max size (which I would happily dedicate an entire 2tb drive for.)

OR: actually complete the autosave when an operation is finished. I certainly didn't have one sketch open for the last day and a half, I didn't even have the timeline scrolled back, or whatever weird operation autosave was waiting for. I had made changes, exported stls, waited for the printer, all of which should have left dozens of 5 minute intervals for autosave to do it's job, but it just flat out doesn't work.

Don't wait for an operation to finish, don't cancel the save if I start a new operation, don't delete them if I close the application without problems... basically don't do anything you currently have it programmed to do. Just save my file. Save it as often as I tell it to. Save it every time. Saving manually every time I tweak a dimension makes the version history meaningless, I don't need the cloud to have my files listed as version 163, that means nothing to me.

Please, make autosave actually save automatically, or remove the option altogether, cause it doesn't do what it's supposed to do.

[TrippyLighting]

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@TECrobotics wrote:

... Inevitably the program crashes...

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I cannot say that I have that experience. Fusion 360 has become pretty stable over the past few years.

What operations are you performing before it crashes and are you submitting crash reports?

[johnanger]

Fusion 360 has been quite stable for me too in the last few years and what you are reporting is not normal and it should not be happening. I have a few general ideas - it may help - it may not. These kind of problems can be pretty tough to diagnose. 

A few ideas with increasing levels of effort required. You're designing robots so I sure these ideas will seem pretty familiar. 

1. I would guess you're doing all kinds of things in Fusion and the crashing is pretty random. Maybe you are like me and have a ton of stuff open all at once. Right now I count 19 open apps. It's just how I work. On my machine I have 16GB of RAM - I think lots of RAM really does help as then disk paging and memory clearing operations are greatly reduced. If an internal programming call can't succeed because of memory availability problems then programs often crash without any grace. Over the years this problem has dwindled but I'm convinced it still happens .So if you have 8GB, get some more or even if you have 16GB, get some more, it's cheap enough. (well, it depends on your computer, on my mac laptop - it's fixed - you get what you order when you buy it, no upgrades possible, Apple.. 😤). 

2. Completely uninstall Fusion and make sure you get all the lingering files erased too. Then reinstall it. When you try again start with some fresh new models and see what happens. Then move on to your saved models. If any Fusion system files or models are partially corrupt what will happen? Crashes I think are likely. 

3. Try Fusion on a different computer - maybe it's your machine? Maybe there is an OS problem. Do you have hardware issues? Using another computer may isolate the problem. Wipe & reinstall the OS - don't install other stuff. Try again. This approach is a ton of work and it may not help at all. Maybe a last resort if nothing else works?

Best wishes on this and I hope you can solve it and get back to interesting work. 

4. are you a paying subscriber? If so, ask autodesk for help.