Save to temp file to prevent file corruption

[trevor.adams]

(Copied from original User Voice forum)

"When Maya crashes during saving, the scene file is corrupted and can't be read most of the time. I've lost a lot of work already because of that.

This could be easily prevented by saving to a temp file, and then deleting the old file/renaming the temp file when the save was successful"

[nineacrefilms]

I think this does happen in some cases but not all. .MBA files can sometimes be found which are the old file.

[zewt]

I think Maya renames the old file, writes the new file, then deletes the renamed old file.

In Unix the usual way of doing this is normally to write the new file to a new filename, flushing to disk, then renaming the new file over the old file, which makes sure that a valid file is left on disk even if the application or computer crashes at any point.  I don't know if that actually works as well on Windows, though.

(As an aside, but I almost never File > Save, and use File > Increment and Save instead.  It gives me lots of backups in case I break something in a scene without noticing, and I never lose a file due to a bad save.)