Does anyone know how if there is an option to autosave in the background? I mean, while I’m working, and autosave happens-the spinning wheel of death pops up and I’m pretty much paralyzed with working until it stops spinning. I know it also depends on your computer and RAM, etc. but I was told by someone that they can continue working and Sketchup just autosaves in the background for them. I’m wondering if there is a way that I can set it up to autosave without stopping me from working, similar to AutoCAD?
Auto save is located via Window>preferences>general>autosave.
You can set it to whatever suits you.
It will run in the background, but it is already set and effects on performance won’t change unless you change other parameters, such as closing trays (autohide), modeling with textures not visible, split model into layers and hide non working layers, etc.
Best to update your profile to include computer hardware so we can give more specific advice.
Personally, I don’t use autosave, I just save once I reach an appropriate point (roughly half an hour).
It does not totally run in the background (as in “parallelized”) because it needs 1. access to the current state of the model and 2. prevent that the state changes while saving hasn’t finished yet. That is why editing is disabled during save as well as autosave (although I could imagine an application could more quickly make a RAM copy of all the model’s memory, and then save this copy to a file in a separate thread).
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How large is your SketchUp file? It might be that you could clean it up by running Purge Unused. It there’s unused stuff that gets removed, the file size would be reduced and the save time should be reduced as well.
You could do as GSTUDIOS does and just manually save periodically. You’d need to be disciplined and actually do it or risk losing your work.
I think that a fair fraction of the time consumed in saving a SKP file relates to validation of the geometry prior to actually writing a new file (at least in SketchUp models dominated by edges and faces, rather than by large images). You can control this in SketchUp Preferences, under General > Automatically check models for problems (that’s the Mac UI presentation). I keep it turned on even though it slows down the frequent manual saves that I do, because I’d rather discover that SketchUp wants to alter the model’s geometry sooner rather than later.
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