Where are Auto-saves on a Mac? Autosave

SketchUp Pro
,
7

OK, I’ve made some progress and have some new information to report that may be helpful to some Mac users. First of all, I restarted my Mac and ran disk utility. I’m now getting autosaves in the RecoveredFiles folder (yay!) BTW, the terminal command you suggested only gave the last half of the directory path, but I was able to find the entire path using the Ruby Console command. The path lives in a root folder called “private” which is hidden, so neither the Finder or Spotlight could find it.

A few observations:

  1. It appears that SU only autosaves a file if there is a change made. If you simply open a file with no changes, it won’t write anything there–which makes sense I guess.
  2. The “Welcome To SketchUp” window does not give access to the autosaved file. I checked the timestamps and tested this–it only shows the last saved version. ***It would be very helpful if SU actually provided access to the autosave file as TheGuz indicated in his post SketchUp Pro 2019 = Let's talk about Saving - #17 by john_drivenupthewall. SU should also provide a time stamp on these files in the “Welcome To SketchUp” window as well as the File/Open menu. When using Open, it displays a familiar Finder window, except the timestamp is removed from the date. Odd. So if checking the time stamp is important to you, you need to double click the file in Finder outside of SU.
  3. If you close the file, the autosave is purged (as mentioned above).
  4. If you want to go back to the last autosave voluntarily (which is something I do fairly often–not due to a crash), then you must navigate to the RecoveredFiles folder and open that file BEFORE closing the file of the same name in SU. Interestingly, this will give you two models open with the exact same name–so you have to know which one to close. A better approach is to drag the autosave out of the RecoveredFiles folder first (before it is purged), then close the open file in SU and then open the autosaved file.

Now that my computer is behaving, and I understand how autosave works and where it parks the file, I can make use of the autosaves for going back less than 5 minutes if I haven’t saved in a while. I find this enormously useful and hope that SU will provide a more transparent path for utilizing autosave in non-crash scenarios.