[Pro-Tip] Never Lose Work Again!

Here’s how I’ve setup blender for years and I’ve never lost work since!.

Blender has a few features that I love and others that I love: not so much, One of my favorites things it’s how fast it is to save a file: unless its above 700 mb, that’s too much and blender will lag for 2 or 3 secs on each save.

A normal file for me is rarely above 100 mb, mostly if say you’re an animator and rigs are linked, and textures are kept externally, in which case I’d still think it’s too much but nevertheless it should be rather healthy.

So if cases like this is you (at least it’s me), then this technique should proove itself useful.

The trick is to go in system preferences, and set the “auto save temporary files” that is already on from 2 mins to 1 (the minimum)…

Why? isnt 2 minutes short enough?, honestly i’ve found that in 2 minutes you can loose meaningful ammounts of work, in 1 not so much, It makes a heck of a difference.

And secondly for this to even be more effective go to “file paths” and set “temporary files” to anything other than the default, because systems like windows and linux will clean these folders either when turning off or turning on, so basically if your electricity for some reason is cut off, then when you restart the machine you might have a chance of having that folder cleaned up.

I put that in my dropbox, that way If i was working on a blend file at home and forgot to save, or to expressely put it in my dropbox for use at work or to show someone, I can just pickup the latest autosave from it which amazingly is really well thought and if you haven’t saved your file at all it will just have a number, but if it has been saved it will keep the name of the originally saved file.

Wonderful, isnt it?, now you’re protected, with this two little settings if your blender crashes, your power goes off, a meteor crashes unto your house burning all your posesions, your latest blends will still survive.

All the best, and keep blending!