Why does autosave not seem to work??
Sep 16, 2021
I'm writing this with a heavy heart, as I just lost a whole day's work. I have a storyline 360 file, saved locally on the C drive, with only two scenes. I had an issue where all the filenames and button text disappeared, which I think was caused by Zoom. Because I was in the middle of an important meeting I had no choice but to restart, thinking that at least the file was autosaved ever 10 minutes. But upon startup I discovered that there's literally nothing saved. Nothing in the temp folder, no prompt that there are unsaved changes. Why wouldn't Storyline save it? What's the point of Autosave if it doesn't work? Feeling very frustrated...
5 Replies
Hi Cleona,
I appreciate you reaching out, and I'm sorry you lost so much work! I'm sure it hasn't been easy re-creating your project. To help provide some understanding, the AutoRecovery setting in Storyline is not an auto-save feature. Here are the details:
To shed more light on that last portion, this feature 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 the software freezes or you closed Storyline by accident.
Storyline 360: Setting Storyline Options
I hope that helps!
Hi Ren, Thanks for your message. Yes, the loss of the work has been pretty disastrous, particularly as I had done a lot of editing in the storyline file from the content document I was provided by the subject matter expert, and now I am confused whether I have caught everything!
So my file had been saved, and was set to autosave every ten minutes. Previously when crashes occurred it has definitely had unsaved changes and then prompted me to save them, but this time there was nothing, nor any temp file. It just seems this is a rather erratic feature of storyline, but one that's quite important to get right. It should be that if you set to autosave, then if you crash, you can consistently return to the last autosaved point, surely?
Hi Cleona,
For the future, you might consider saving dated versions. I typically save projects I'm working on with new names daily, e.g., Extravasation_20210917.story, etc. I know it takes up a lot more space, but I keep the interim versions until the project is done.
Another thing is to have an automatic backup like Cobian Backup, which is free. I have it backing up new and changed files from my documents folder to an SD card every two hours. Again, takes space, but it's saved me a few times.
Wait, is autosave seriously still not a feature? Do you know how many hours your community has lost due to this fundamental lack of functionality? This is laughably bad design.
Just lost 3 hours of work AGAIN today because of this functionality we can't trust. It seems quite basic, it's very infuriating. I was working from a local drive. It was set to 10 min. There is only a 2 days old version when I go to AppData\Roaming\Articulate\Storyline!