That’s fantastic. Not everyone has a “guru” mate, and not everyone using SketchUp is a geek, nor should they be. And I did not see this recommendation/disclaimer anywhere in the release notes, nor the Help page. But, can we really expect geeks to care about the not-fully-geeky population that they sell their baby application to, this is the question here. And I think we got some answers.
“It’s the only solution” (read “we cannot improve on this”) only for as long as someone says it’s the only solution. We can really do better than this, and products are getting better every day, and will continue to get better - but not only because someone can write code and call themselves a guru, you need more than that to be a good developer. But, in any case, the Team Members thank you for giving them a pass.
PS: I, of course, completely agree that the manual saving habit is a good idea. The arrogance (and they know who they are) is what we should not see here.
While constantly saving is easy to do and protects you if you crash, it also locks in changes you have made to your model and overwrites the last backup–which occasionally isn’t what I want. Though I religiously create incremental versions of models when making major changes (about every hour or so), there are times when I want to roll back my current working version if I’ve messed up my model and can’t undo all my changes. Sometimes I “revert” if I’m willing to roll back to the last manual save. But sometimes that might be too far back. If I just want to go back a few minutes, this is where autosave used to be my friend. I can still do this using the workaround of finding the autosave file through the Ruby Console (if the file is still open), but it’s more difficult, and as Ria has pointed out, this info was only found by way of these forums and not any information release from SU. My belief is that the logic behind backups and autosaves was not well thought out for multiple contingencies. As I mentioned earlier, introducing the terminology of a “recovery file” in mixed use with “autosave” further muddies the concept with users, and probably internally as well. Looking forward to an update soon!
Audiobrad. Ruby Console and I have never met, and I will admit that I am not particularly eager to make her acquaintance. I just need an easy way to not lose hours of work, without the necessity of developing an automatic fast twitch of the thumb and forefinger of my left hand on Dogpaw/S. I am hoping SketchUp hears our plaintive cry.
I only met Ruby a couple weeks ago via this thread in order to find the Autosaves. You can also find it usingTerminal (on a Mac) but the Ruby command posted above is easy. Just select Window/Ruby Console, paste the command below, then return:
This opens the RecoverdFiles folder. This is where the autosaves live–until they die (as described in the thread above).
I was trying to open the release notes of the M1 2019 (!whoohoo!) to see if this was fixed, but this link: https://help.sketchup.com/en/tags/release-notes
Lead to the original release notes of 5 feb, instead of 8 apr.
Are we supposed to get email notifications of updates? I didn’t receive one, nor have I been getting email updates on this thread over the past week or so. My profile settings appear correct and I checked my spam folder.
Normally, SketchUp would give you an alert from within the app.
In this case, the cat was let out of the bag a bit earlier than expected, so you are finding out about this update before the official in-app alert was sent. People with the original SketchUp Pro 2019 download should get that in-app alert in the next two days.
Thanks Guz–good to know I would have been alerted by the app. But while checking my account info, I found that my Trimble account still had me listed as a “Free” user. But after more digging found this page https://help.sketchup.com/en/account-management-portal which indicated that “The Trimble Account Manager is for managing subscriptions only…” and Classic licenses are managed through the store–where I did find my correct Pro license. Why aren’t these integrated? As previously mentioned in this thread, I think there is much room for improvement in SU’s communications and eliminating confusion. I still maintain that mixing the use of the terms “autosave”–which is what it is called in the application preferences–and “recovery file” adds unnecessary confusion.
I always figured out that Windows hidden folders were not supposed to be used by a user. Why did the SketchUp Engineering Group choose this location? (just curious).
Thanks.
The now called ‘recovered’ files are not ment to have some sort of version history of your files. Backup is saved in the location of the working model, autosave/recovered files are just there in case if SketchUp splats…
so need not be in a ‘open’ location.
Not uncommon for apps:
I put an alias of the Recovered files in the side bar. That way I can look at the file that in there before replacing my working file. (You can also say yes to the prompt and if you don’t like the file you can close it without saving and open the original file instead.) Having the folder handy is good when you want to throw the files away. What usually happens for me is, I keep getting the prompt that a newer file is available, although it is no longer the newer file.
I came across this comment while thinking about writing a new post about the differences between auto save and backup.
What you said is generally correct, but what if the Automator action was pointing at the auto save folder? Then you could make a series of recent backups, and if there was a crash you might opt to choose the auto save file from 15 minutes ago, rather than 5 minutes ago, because after all it could have been the changes you made 10 minutes ago that ended up causing the crash. Your five minutes ago file might immediately crash too, with no way to get at the 15 minutes ago version.
