Hello! I am wondering if there is an autosave function? I tried searching the forum but only seemed to see threads about earlier versions.
I have a brand new install of storyline and it occasionally freezes up on me or crashes. I'd love to set an autosave to make sure I'm not accidentally missing any of my work. I do save fairly often but when I am working on something that is interaction heavy I sometimes miss it.
We don't have an auto save feature, but we have an auto recovery. The difference being, that'll it will return you to an earlier version of your course if your Storyline program crashes, but it won't consistently save and have that copy accessible to you if you closed Storyline by accident. You can enable the auto recovery feature here.
You can also look in your temp files to see if there are auto recovery versions in there. Follow these steps:
1) Open this folder in Windows Explorer: %appdata%\Articulate\Storyline
2) Scan the contents of this folder for a file that starts with the name of your project. If you find one, copy it to your desktop. If you find more than one, copy the latest version to your desktop.
3) Change the file extension of the copy on your desktop from *.tmp to *.story.
4) Double-click the file to open it in Storyline.
Hope that helps and let us know if you need anything else! Storyline shouldn't be crashing, so our Support Engineers are also happy to work with you on that set up!
thanks, I work for a company and it is happening to my co workers too. Glad to know there's an auto-recovery and thanks for the great tips on temp files.
One other thought, where are you and your colleagues saving and working on project files? You'll want to make sure you work on them locally (you can always back up to a network/shared drive after the fact) as not working locally could cause odd behavior in Storyline and ultimately lead to file corruption. Check out our guidelines here to help prevent that!
My storyline has been crashing a lot. It just crashed. I have autorecovery set to save every 10 minutes. It didn't. There is no recovered file. Of course, this is one of those times I haven't hit save since... oh... well, the last file I have says it was saved at 4:41pm. It's 12:32am as I type this. My project due date is in about 8 hours. Just wanted to share that. well, I'd better get started on this project! Maybe someone can let me know how to really get the autorecovery feature to work -- I should've been hitting save as well, I do get that, but yeah, I kind of feel like my parachute didn't open. I actually need to contact the team and figure out what's happening -- I've had so many problems with this program functioning, the crashing, memory errors, strange reformatting surprises . . . but this is really the most awful surprise of all. I did cut and paste the link you gave above -- the last time anything was autosaved appears to have been on the 9th of this month, at 9:41pm. That was nearly a week ago. I'm really puzzled.
I'm sorry to hear you've hit such a roadblock with this project, I can imagine how frustrating that is. I hope that you do reach out to our Support engineers as they're there to help! Although we may not be able to recover your project, we can at least look at ways in which we can prevent the crashing and errors you've seen.
I didn't see a case already submitted based on your email here in ELH, so if you do submit the case please let me know. I'd like to follow along as they work towards a resolution. 🙂
Thank you very much -- I haven't yet worked out the how and why to contact
storyline customer service, although when I did contact the help desk with
another issue they were remarkably responsive and the reply did seem to fix
the error I was having at the time (the program would try to update on each
of my three user IDs on my laptop, rather than just updating once.)
Honestly, I've had so many varied and random issues with Storyline since I
started this position three months ago that I hardly know where to begin.
It's literally put my job at some risk -- my manager decided I must be
slacking off, my projects were taking so long, and I was beginning to
wonder myself if i'd lost my usually strong skills at learning new
software, particularly user-friendly software like Storyline. I finally
asked a co-worker, the only other using Storyline, to sit down with me and
see what I was doing "wrong." She was startled at the things that were
happening, because they weren't happening to her, and that begin a process
of what i hope is some redemption here, after a rather rocky beginning.
(I'm also hoping that I can begin working 8 hours days again, rather than
12 or 15.) I finally decided that I had to get my work done, and I had to
just figure out ways to work around the problems, even if they were clumsy.
Fonts and colors change, apparently at random, even when I apply our
branded templates, fonts and colors. I just spent hours trying to determine
why some layer objects were vanishing after 45 seconds, no matter what I
did to the timeline or object (that turned out to be the result of a lot of
randomly applied animations... something I don't use and will later
hopefully find out how that happened). If my research on that is correct,
any exit animation overrides the timeline settings... which would be fine
if I'd actually intended to apply an exit animation to a "Close" button,
for instance.
I get a lot of "memory" crashes, despite having a brand-new HP laptop
intentionally purchased with lots of memory and the latest version of
Windows Professional. The error yesterday.. ugh.. that was new and will
hopefully never occur again. I did realize that I could've saved myself
some work if I'd imported an earlier version into a new project, and then
looked for updated slides in the version I couldn't save... but I was also
nervous that any changes I made to Master Slides would be lost in the
transition, since they barely seem to be able to handle being cut and
pasted within the same project.
This is more than you need to know, and more than I should share, but I'm
writing it out in part so that I will also remember which issues to bring
up with the Help Desk once I finish my now-a-day-overdue project, hopefully
this afternoon.
thanks again, have a great weekend.
Regards,
Steven
*Steven J. Rickard |*
*eLearning Writer*ClearChoice Management Services LLC
8350 E. Crescent Pkwy, Suite 300 | Greenwood Village, CO 80111
303.217.2406
Internal Ext: 1006
Email: *srickard@clearchoice.com *
Just an FYI: your email signature came through when you replied via email. You can remove that if needed by clicking ‘Edit’ beneath your response. Here’s a quick Peek video if you need help.
Thanks! I didn't realize that replying to the email resulted in another post to the board, I appreciate the heads up. Oddly, I don't have an "edit" button under my response, it simply reads "Reply, Quote, Flag, Marks as Helpful, and Bookmark."
It looks like you may be logged in with a different Articulate ID here? The name on this most recent post is listed as "Performance Team" while Leslie's response was address to an account with the name "Steven Rickard".
That is correct -- unfortunately, I'm using an account assigned to our
team, and do not have access to that email password. I will remember to
remove personal info when replying via mail! thank you!
When you are logged into the forums with your 'Steven Rickard' account, you should be able to edit the response that we mentioned above :) It's no worries on our part, we just want to be sure that you're aware.
Out of interest why don't you just do a conventional auto save feature like every other software, that everyone understands? My storyline doesn't seem to always realise it has crashed, and so often does not do me the courtesy of a recovery file.
It's reassuring but slightly depressing to read others having the same Sisyphean struggles with this program I have. Temperamental is the understatement. Every time I'm ready to flip it works really smoothly for a few weeks and I'm so grateful that it is behaving vaguely predictably that I always fall for it, and then afterwards I feel very naive.
Sorry you've had such trouble with this. Have you checked after a crash to see if the files are in your temp folders?
Here's how to check:
1. Open this folder in Windows Explorer:
Tueppdata%\Articulate\Storyline
2. Scan the contents of this folder for a file that starts with the name of your project. If you find one, copy it to your desktop. If you find more than one, copy the latest version to your desktop.
3. Change the file extension of the copy on your desktop from *.tmp to *.story.
4. Double-click the file to open it in Storyline.
Our team looked into an autosave feature some time ago, and it was determined that saving content and determining when something should be saved should be in the hands of the author, not something we implement, it can also lead to a performance slow down if it's constantly saving in the background. The auto recovery feature was put in place so that if something happened with Storyline, it would allow you to resume working where you left off. That's a feature that you'll need to enable, and it will only take effect after your first manual save.
If I am working on a project and my laptop dies or my SL crashes, it would be nice if next time I open my SL file it had saved all the work I did in case I forgot to hit save.
Many other apps do this, especially Microsoft suite apps like Word, Excel, PPT, etc...
Not sure if SL is too complex for such a feature but it would be very helpful.
Also, sometimes I am in a state of mental flow when designing a project and it's an annoying mental pull to have to keep remembering to hit save just in case SL crashes, which it has crashed many times on me before and I have had to redo some work I already completed.
Let me know if this helps understand what I am looking for in this potential feature. If not, I am happy to answer further questions or jump on a phone call.
Yep, up vote for auto recovery that actually works, regardless of whether you've clicked save or not. Your application crashes for the most trivial reasons - I was simply resizing an icon when it crapped itself this time. Just lost two hours of work because I didn't click save, even though auto-recovery is checked. I shouldn't have to work with my fingers crossed - if you're not going to make the application stable at least make it possible to recover your work.
I have Build 3.30.19518.0 installed. SL has been unexpectedly closing down without any error messages. Each time I lose everything I worked on since the last saved version. Auto-recovery is set to 10 minutes, but it's not saving anything. I checked under C:\Users\AppData\Roaming\Articulate\Storyline and have no temp file. I real autosave would be useful considering that, unfortunately, SL crashes regularly.
33 Replies
Hi Stephanie,
We don't have an auto save feature, but we have an auto recovery. The difference being, that'll it will return you to an earlier version of your course if your Storyline program crashes, but it won't consistently save and have that copy accessible to you if you closed Storyline by accident. You can enable the auto recovery feature here.
You can also look in your temp files to see if there are auto recovery versions in there. Follow these steps:
1) Open this folder in Windows Explorer: %appdata%\Articulate\Storyline
2) Scan the contents of this folder for a file that starts with the name of your project. If you find one, copy it to your desktop. If you find more than one, copy the latest version to your desktop.
3) Change the file extension of the copy on your desktop from *.tmp to *.story.
4) Double-click the file to open it in Storyline.
Hope that helps and let us know if you need anything else! Storyline shouldn't be crashing, so our Support Engineers are also happy to work with you on that set up!
thanks, I work for a company and it is happening to my co workers too. Glad to know there's an auto-recovery and thanks for the great tips on temp files.
Hi Stephanie,
One other thought, where are you and your colleagues saving and working on project files? You'll want to make sure you work on them locally (you can always back up to a network/shared drive after the fact) as not working locally could cause odd behavior in Storyline and ultimately lead to file corruption. Check out our guidelines here to help prevent that!
thank you. we are working locally
Always like to check - just in case. 🙂
If you reach out to our Support engineers let me know - I'd love to follow along as to why Storyline is crashing for you.
I often have multiple lessons open at once, I am wondering if that's the case! I'll follow up. thanks
That could definitely be it - and in addition to crashing, it lead to the loss of data or corruption as I mentioned.
Let us know if you need anything else!
My storyline has been crashing a lot. It just crashed. I have autorecovery set to save every 10 minutes. It didn't. There is no recovered file. Of course, this is one of those times I haven't hit save since... oh... well, the last file I have says it was saved at 4:41pm. It's 12:32am as I type this. My project due date is in about 8 hours. Just wanted to share that. well, I'd better get started on this project! Maybe someone can let me know how to really get the autorecovery feature to work -- I should've been hitting save as well, I do get that, but yeah, I kind of feel like my parachute didn't open. I actually need to contact the team and figure out what's happening -- I've had so many problems with this program functioning, the crashing, memory errors, strange reformatting surprises . . . but this is really the most awful surprise of all. I did cut and paste the link you gave above -- the last time anything was autosaved appears to have been on the 9th of this month, at 9:41pm. That was nearly a week ago. I'm really puzzled.
I'm sorry to hear you've hit such a roadblock with this project, I can imagine how frustrating that is. I hope that you do reach out to our Support engineers as they're there to help! Although we may not be able to recover your project, we can at least look at ways in which we can prevent the crashing and errors you've seen.
I didn't see a case already submitted based on your email here in ELH, so if you do submit the case please let me know. I'd like to follow along as they work towards a resolution. 🙂
Thank you very much -- I haven't yet worked out the how and why to contact
storyline customer service, although when I did contact the help desk with
another issue they were remarkably responsive and the reply did seem to fix
the error I was having at the time (the program would try to update on each
of my three user IDs on my laptop, rather than just updating once.)
Honestly, I've had so many varied and random issues with Storyline since I
started this position three months ago that I hardly know where to begin.
It's literally put my job at some risk -- my manager decided I must be
slacking off, my projects were taking so long, and I was beginning to
wonder myself if i'd lost my usually strong skills at learning new
software, particularly user-friendly software like Storyline. I finally
asked a co-worker, the only other using Storyline, to sit down with me and
see what I was doing "wrong." She was startled at the things that were
happening, because they weren't happening to her, and that begin a process
of what i hope is some redemption here, after a rather rocky beginning.
(I'm also hoping that I can begin working 8 hours days again, rather than
12 or 15.) I finally decided that I had to get my work done, and I had to
just figure out ways to work around the problems, even if they were clumsy.
Fonts and colors change, apparently at random, even when I apply our
branded templates, fonts and colors. I just spent hours trying to determine
why some layer objects were vanishing after 45 seconds, no matter what I
did to the timeline or object (that turned out to be the result of a lot of
randomly applied animations... something I don't use and will later
hopefully find out how that happened). If my research on that is correct,
any exit animation overrides the timeline settings... which would be fine
if I'd actually intended to apply an exit animation to a "Close" button,
for instance.
I get a lot of "memory" crashes, despite having a brand-new HP laptop
intentionally purchased with lots of memory and the latest version of
Windows Professional. The error yesterday.. ugh.. that was new and will
hopefully never occur again. I did realize that I could've saved myself
some work if I'd imported an earlier version into a new project, and then
looked for updated slides in the version I couldn't save... but I was also
nervous that any changes I made to Master Slides would be lost in the
transition, since they barely seem to be able to handle being cut and
pasted within the same project.
This is more than you need to know, and more than I should share, but I'm
writing it out in part so that I will also remember which issues to bring
up with the Help Desk once I finish my now-a-day-overdue project, hopefully
this afternoon.
thanks again, have a great weekend.
Regards,
Steven
*Steven J. Rickard |*
*eLearning Writer*ClearChoice Management Services LLC
8350 E. Crescent Pkwy, Suite 300 | Greenwood Village, CO 80111
303.217.2406
Internal Ext: 1006
Email: *srickard@clearchoice.com *
Hey Steven,
Just an FYI: your email signature came through when you replied via email. You can remove that if needed by clicking ‘Edit’ beneath your response. Here’s a quick Peek video if you need help.
Thanks! I didn't realize that replying to the email resulted in another post to the board, I appreciate the heads up. Oddly, I don't have an "edit" button under my response, it simply reads "Reply, Quote, Flag, Marks as Helpful, and Bookmark."
It looks like you may be logged in with a different Articulate ID here? The name on this most recent post is listed as "Performance Team" while Leslie's response was address to an account with the name "Steven Rickard".
That is correct -- unfortunately, I'm using an account assigned to our
team, and do not have access to that email password. I will remember to
remove personal info when replying via mail! thank you!
Hey Steven,
When you are logged into the forums with your 'Steven Rickard' account, you should be able to edit the response that we mentioned above :) It's no worries on our part, we just want to be sure that you're aware.
Out of interest why don't you just do a conventional auto save feature like every other software, that everyone understands? My storyline doesn't seem to always realise it has crashed, and so often does not do me the courtesy of a recovery file.
It's reassuring but slightly depressing to read others having the same Sisyphean struggles with this program I have. Temperamental is the understatement. Every time I'm ready to flip it works really smoothly for a few weeks and I'm so grateful that it is behaving vaguely predictably that I always fall for it, and then afterwards I feel very naive.
Hi Amanda,
Sorry you've had such trouble with this. Have you checked after a crash to see if the files are in your temp folders?
Here's how to check:
1. Open this folder in Windows Explorer:
Tueppdata%\Articulate\Storyline
2. Scan the contents of this folder for a file that starts with the name of your project. If you find one, copy it to your desktop. If you find more than one, copy the latest version to your desktop.
3. Change the file extension of the copy on your desktop from *.tmp to *.story.
4. Double-click the file to open it in Storyline.
Our team looked into an autosave feature some time ago, and it was determined that saving content and determining when something should be saved should be in the hands of the author, not something we implement, it can also lead to a performance slow down if it's constantly saving in the background. The auto recovery feature was put in place so that if something happened with Storyline, it would allow you to resume working where you left off. That's a feature that you'll need to enable, and it will only take effect after your first manual save.
Can we please add Auto-save as a feature request?
Thanks in advance!
Hey Philip! Storyline has a built-in auto-recovery feature that you can access in the Storyline Options menu.
It sounds like you're looking for something a bit more specific, though. Can you elaborate on what you have in mind for our product team? Thanks!
Yes, thanks for asking.
If I am working on a project and my laptop dies or my SL crashes, it would be nice if next time I open my SL file it had saved all the work I did in case I forgot to hit save.
Many other apps do this, especially Microsoft suite apps like Word, Excel, PPT, etc...
Not sure if SL is too complex for such a feature but it would be very helpful.
Also, sometimes I am in a state of mental flow when designing a project and it's an annoying mental pull to have to keep remembering to hit save just in case SL crashes, which it has crashed many times on me before and I have had to redo some work I already completed.
Let me know if this helps understand what I am looking for in this potential feature. If not, I am happy to answer further questions or jump on a phone call.
Thanks in advance!
Yep, up vote for auto recovery that actually works, regardless of whether you've clicked save or not. Your application crashes for the most trivial reasons - I was simply resizing an icon when it crapped itself this time. Just lost two hours of work because I didn't click save, even though auto-recovery is checked. I shouldn't have to work with my fingers crossed - if you're not going to make the application stable at least make it possible to recover your work.
I appreciate that feedback and use-case Philip. I've shared your thoughts with our team.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Chris. I've passed them on to our team as well.
Thank you, Leslie!
I have Build 3.30.19518.0 installed. SL has been unexpectedly closing down without any error messages. Each time I lose everything I worked on since the last saved version. Auto-recovery is set to 10 minutes, but it's not saving anything. I checked under C:\Users\AppData\Roaming\Articulate\Storyline and have no temp file. I real autosave would be useful considering that, unfortunately, SL crashes regularly.