Fusion 360 autosave/recovery no longer works

[wjatevrr]

This is the second time over the last month that Fusion crashes on me and I lose a day's worth of work and the Recovery File shows empty. I was frustrated so uninstalled then reinstalled Fusion the last time this happened, but this just happened again today and I lost all my work. Open Recovered Documents shows empty (0).

My recovery autosave is set to every 8 minutes, but clearly this isn't working.

Is this happening to anyone else, and is there anything I can do?

[TheCADWhisperer]

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@wjatevrr wrote:

Is this happening to anyone else, and is there anything I can do?

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@wjatevrr 

Are you clicking Save every few minutes?

My students would hear me say Save Often every time you do something right - Save It they printed t-shirts with this simple message.

Worked for me for more than 30 years.  
Learned once and never lost an entire days work again.

[wjatevrr]

It sounds like your students are working on very simple files and assemblies, I work on more complex designs with all kinds of moving parts, so rather than crowd the file's save history by saving every few minutes, my saves are milestone-based (which can sometimes take a day or heck, longer), I also write a progress update on each save version. But it is indeed general good practice to save frequently and I should make more an effort to break down some milestones as I make progress.

That being said, this doesn't solve the issue and Fusion is supposed to save in the background every 8 minutes as intended, and I shouldn't just lose that backup file, even less repeatedly so.

[jhackney1972]

You may want to try this command sequence.  It is suppose to force a Recovery Save and this of course will not create a version.  Try it out on a simple model before you trust it.

[jhackney1972]

As an addition to my proposal to use Crtl+Shift+S to create a recovery document, here is the Autodesk article explaining how to use it.  It seems to work well as I tested it.  The file created by it is removed if you close or save the file normally.

[wjatevrr]

Thanks John for the forced recovery save shortcut

I’ve had an interesting development. Fusion crashed a third time (yes it’s amazing how unreliable it’s become) but this time, I had 2 files open. One was of a very small and simple assembly, only a few KB in total size, the other I had been working on for several hours at the time of the crash was very large, over 200MB (over a hundred sketches, lots of components, sheet metal etc). When I restarted Fusion after the crash, the small assembly was there in the recovery folder (and I was prompted to recover it after reboot), but the large assembly was missing (lost my work again).

Could it be that Fusion’s auto recovery doesn’t work on larger files?

[HughesTooling]

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@wjatevrr wrote:

Could it be that Fusion’s auto recovery doesn’t work on larger files?

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Don't think so. What's probably happening is Fusion is crashing while creating the backup file. Not sure if this is still a problem but what I've noticed is Fusion will freeze for a few seconds while it creates the backup files and if you try manipulating the browser while it's frozen, like expanding a folder or double clicking a sketch to edit nothing happens and you think perhaps you've miss clicked so you try again. Do that a few times while the backup is being created and Fusion will crash and you get no auto save.

Mark

[wjatevrr]

Thanks Mark. I think you might be right, this might be exactly what’s been happening. 

I would think the correct behavior would be for Fusion to delete the backup file only AFTER a new one has been created though. I should always have the last backup available if the current backup fails. Very frustrating

So far I've been trying to be more patient and not touch anything whenever Fusion looks busy, I also reduced save intervals from 8min to 15min to lower the chances of this happening. It hasn't happened to me again so far.