Recovered Documents not working w/ cloud computing service

[Anonymous]

Problem: When using Fusion 360 on a cloud computing service (www.shadow.tech) and with auto-save on exit disabled, document recovery does not work if computer shuts off, and I lose hours of work.

Expected behaviour: I'm expecting that the project I'm working on will occasionally auto-save as a recovery document in the background so that if the computer turns off, when I turn the computer back on and open Fusion back up there should be a near recent version of the project auto-saved in the recovered documents folder.

Details: 
I have auto-save on exit disabled because I don't like how that feature works.

On my regular desktop, if Fusion crashes, (I'm not sure if this also includes the whole computer system crashing or abruptly powering off) I feel like I typically can find what I had just been working on in the recovered documents folder. 

I use a Shadow (Windows 10 PC in the cloud, www.shadow.tech) occasionally to work on Fusion projects. Because of the streaming bandwidth, the service will automatically shut down the Shadow after being idle for (I think) 30 minutes or so. I don't know the exact mechanism the cloud service uses to shut down, whether it's a normal Windows 10 shutdown process or if it's akin to physically pulling the power plug on a normal computer. It's caused me a lot of headaches because if I step away from my computer for a long conversation or other distraction, if the Shadow shuts off by the time I come back, I've lost all my work (usually several hours worth) and there isn't a version of it in the recovered documents folder. This is the big sad, hopefully you guys know of some settings I can change to prevent this or can work to fix this shortcoming in Fusion.

I don't know if recovery versions work if my regular desktop computer also has power cut to it or otherwise shuts down. If it doesn't work then either, that's also a problem. I assume it does work though because I've never noticed a problem and I assume my computer has shut off before while working with fusion and it would have been pretty memorable to lose a few hours work because of it. If the Fusion team decides to look at this problem, the Shadow service is pretty cheap and the same desktop you get is the same configuration mine would be in so it should be easy to diagnose the problem.

I don't know if auto-save on exit being disabled is part of my problem, but turning it back on is not an ideal solution. I purposefully disable auto-save on exit because I don't like the versions ballooning from v10 to v75 just because it wants to auto-save any time I open a project to look at it and happen to need to show/hide some bodies or components while looking at it but don't actually make any changes to the models. That makes it really hard to find old versions I need to revert back to if it went from v10 to v75 but only v34 actually had something new added/changed. If auto-save on exit had other parameters/conditions I could choose to determine if it should be auto-saved, then I'd love to turn that feature back on. Like maybe if I could choose to auto-save on exit if I made a new extrusion, imported a new component, created a new sketch, etc. Auto-saving just because I used a show/hide feature is not helpful. 

[lance.carocci]

@Anonymous could you please tell me more about the state Fusion 360 is in once you leave the cloud PC idle? Is there a command window open?

One thought is that Fusion 360 cannot make a recovery save if a command is active; if Fusion is idle with, say, Extrude open, you will come back to a warning that recovery saves could not complete because of this.

Another possibility, as you suggest, is how Shadow is shutting down inactive sessions. Fusion makes recovery saves to %appdata%\Autodesk\Autodesk Fusion 360\<GUID>\CrashRecovery. If the remote session is being destroyed on idle, there is likely no chance for this Roaming profile to sync to their system. Otherwise, as long as Windows shuts down/logs out and cleanly syncs your Appdata/Roaming directory, the files should be in the aforementioned directory.

From the looks of Shadow's Knowledge Base, there isn't a clear indicator of how Windows is shutting down - they mention Hibernate, which should save your current application state, but it doesn't sound like this is happening for you. If you are able to confirm that recovery saves are being made to the correct directory, the next step would be to follow up with Shadow's support team to better understand their shutdown process, and possibly make them aware of this issue.