AUTOSAVE!!!

[CNCbyTME]

For the love of Dog, institute an autosave feature. I use this software for business. Multi-Million Dollar projects. Constantly. I'm sure I'm not alone when I say that when we get involved in projects, we get tunnel vision. Why? Because Inventor is incredible software and the design possibilities are endless. 

However, you can't include an Autosave Feature? 

As much as I love your software, I curse your name every time I'm building a project for a client and the software just decides to close. No rhyme. No reason.

The VERY least you can do while your software is so prone to crashes, it to allow your customers who spend ridiculous amounts of money to use your un-reliable software is to ensure we won't lose our work as we use it.

Make it happen! Vectorworks has that feature AND NEVER crashes.

[The_Angry_Elf]

@matt , I'm a bit concerned that you are having so many crashes. That's not the norm.

Of course, be sure you are up to date on the service packs as well as your graphics drivers.

Then, what is your hardware make up and what are your files like?

I deal with assemblies with 10's of thousands of parts and in some cases miles of equipment under roof and have seldom experience crashes as often as what you are claiming. To be honest, most often the reason we see a crash is due to the user not being up to date on service packs and drivers...or under-powered hardware. The other reason we used to see a lot was poor technique, but we've mostly moved past that with proper training.

[johnmondro4888]

New Dell notebook (Precision.) Xeon processor, 64GB RAM, RTX 5000. Rock solid. No issues with any other applications except random crashes in Inventor 2023.

Working on a fairly simple injection molded part. Attempt to apply a tangent constraint to a 2D sketch - Inventor crashes. Simple operation - who knows what went wrong. No CER note, no "Please let us know what was happening (blah, blah, blah...)" 20 minutes of work lost. Just right back to the desktop - same issue over and over and over again with Inventor.

Go ahead Inventor fanboys - spam then hell out of me with your smarmy "you should have been saving", "CTRL-S - anyone can do it, it's your fault." Well BS! I've worked with many mechanical design software packages that either allow autosaves -or- actually save your work before crashing. Not Inventor though - it's mechanical design for masochists!!

Ok, giving up on asking for an Autosave. Maybe something that would provide a small shock through the mouse at a user-programmed interval? Maybe a USB hand that could be mounted to the monitor to slap me? Or the jump-scare face from that PC maze game? Yeah, now were talking!

[Guthery1]

As a designer that has been doing this for 20+ years, I can testify that there needs to be an autosave feature in Inventor.  I have lost significant time on projects because I would get wrapped up into the design and completely lose track of time.  If Inventor had an autosave built in, it would have saved me on several occasions.  Could that cause an issue with modeling?  Maybe, but it depends on how the autosave worked.  

Perhaps have a floating save.  Hold the information in memory until the software is properly closed and protected from crashes by being maintained by a separate piece of software.  That way if Inventor crashes, which it does and more often than I like, the data isn't lost but it doesn't have a regular interrupt either like many autosave features do.  It could be configured to clear out every time you hit save button so the file size can be managed.  It's not like the computers people are using for Inventor are short on RAM or these days.  And even if it was an issue, RAM isn't that expensive unless you get into some seriously massive sticks or you just have to have all the pretty lights on them.

Solidworks has an autosave.  AutoCad has an autosave.  You have an add-on that supposedly does autosave in Inventor.  Even your own forums have a built-in autosave feature.  Get on board and add a functional autosave to Inventor as part of the base software instead of looking for an extra $10 a year per person.

[ian]

Is frightening how many hour we have lost at work, because of this, if solidworks can do it then why cannot Inventor, the little timer reminder is a little message in the corner of the screen that I don't even see when I am under the pressure that Autodesk developers have never experienced in their life. (should be a big red message across the screen) with an option in applications if you want it on or not, its not rocket science.

I have just googled this issue, and apparently there is an app available that does this but its a subscription, so given the thousands of pounds we spend on subscription's, why can we not get this as an update.

My boss is seriously considering a move over to S/W, this is one of many failings with Autodesk.

[MKE_Howard]

Hi, there's already a post about this : AutoSave Inventor files - Autodesk Community 

I agree with you but the old version folder would not have any use anymore. If you want to, there's a couple of Ilogic and VBa code for autosave. heres one : Solved: Re: AUTOSAVE OPTION IN INVENTOR - Autodesk Community - Inventor.

[rkeller]

I would be grateful if IV would just save the state of things before it CRASHES AND DUMPS EVERYTHING!  Or at least pause and let me save it before everything varnishes.   This has been the most frustrating thing I find with Inventor since 2007!

[steinar_sorem]

Strange someone struggle with crash. in our environment it is rear, very rear seeing that issue. Could it be environment related, and not the software?

[gmcleodGUALP]

AUTOSAVE FUNCTION FFS!!

[gmcleodGUALP]

Give us an Auto Save function or stop your software from crashing!

[hshorst]

Please add autosave, or at least a popup that forces to you decide to save or not.  It's too easy to lose work.  This doesn't happen in other software I use.

[nickada]

I ALWAYS save my work every 3 to 5 minutes. Except this morning - I just lost a half hour of fairly complex work!

Please, please, please, we need auto save!!

[ivan_rados]

Yes please, and thank you!

[rkeller]

AMEN!
This has been one of my major complaints since first using Inventor in
2007.
Also wish they would let you sketch in 3d like we can in AutoCad - but
that's for another discussion.

[HishamWQ298]

I wanted to second this thread because of my personal painful experiences using Inventor, even a recovery temp file would be very good but ideally an autosave feature could be very useful as well. 

please work hard to implement this Inventor developers, we really need it. 

[rkeller]

I've had Inventor want shut down lately because of video output BUT it
actually asks if I want to save the files I was working on!

This tells me that the developers have figured a way to stop and save
pre-crash

Time to fix the crash and dump!

Rodney Keller

[johnmondro4888]

<sarcasm alert>

No need for an Autosave feature! Just use Autodesk's tried & true solution..

CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S, CTRL-S.

Ad nauseum.

It's ok though, Fusion has an Autosave. When all Inventor users are unceremoniously moved to it - we'll have an Autosave! Yea!

[WCrihfield]

Lots of history with this idea, so this has likely already been mentioned, but if a 'forced' autosave was introduced into Inventor, I would want to be able to turn it on/off relatively easily.

I also work with pretty large assemblies with thousands of components and thousands of referenced files on a relatively regular basis, and can't hardly remember the last time Inventor crashed on me.  I even get annoyed by the small save reminder pop-up that happens every so often.  Sure I have lost progress before by a rare crash or accidentally clicking too quickly and closing something without saving by accident.  We've probably all had that happen.  But we also make a lot of changes to documents that we don't want to save to that document also, and if they did get suddenly / unpredictably saved, it can't easily be undone, and would screw a lot of stuff up, and take a lot of time & effort to change back again.  Common responses to that are likely to make those changes to a copy of the file, instead of the original, but sometimes 'stuff happens', as they say (using a different 'S' word).  Some of the changes we are making we do intend to save, but there is often some experimentation going on in the design process, and just like we sometimes forget to manually click the Save button, we also forget to use the SaveAs or SaveCopyAs button before continuing into those experimental stages.  Too many different cases to mention here, but more options/control is generally better than less options/control.  The same way not everyone uses the same overall design strategies to achieve their ultimate goals.

[steinar_sorem]

Ensure to have enough hardware capacity with updated graphic driver! Desktop Workstation as HP Z8, RTX /Ada graphic card, 64GB RAM and huge assemblies with 30000 referenced files. Extremely rarely crash to us. HP Fury Z Book laptops is only used to external or meeting work. 180 users not struggle with crashes in our environment. all of them using the same workstation, som upgrade with 128GB RAM if Nastran work on daily basis. 

Inventor 2023.5 at the moment.
A tip is to always have a empty as possible Temp folder space to where Inventor work

[johnmondro4888]

@steinar_sorem wow, that's great. Glad you're not having any issues. We didn't seem to have any issues with 2023 either.