# Auto save in Photoshop



## plejon

MS Word has a "Save auto recover info every x minutes" option, so you can't lose a hours of work in case of a computer crash.

Does Photoshop have a similar auto-save option? How do I activate it?

I saw this 3rd party tool, but the companies website doesn't inspire much confidence. Anybody know this tool?
http://www.atopsoft.com/products/autosave/article_autosave_photoshop.html


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## lister

No, Photoshop doesn't have an autosave option - I'm unsure if Photoshop's scripting capabilities will do so either.
I would just say to 'get into the habit' of saving your progress often; in the long run it will be nore reliable than any plugin!


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## plejon

Major bummer. Today, I lost two hours of work again, because I didn't save my work, and Photoshop crashed on me. OK, I agree, I should save more often, but I'm probably not the only person in the world who lost hours of photoshop work. An Office style autorecovery would be a *very* nice enhancement.


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## lister

No, not the first!  
Years ago, I lost work on a semi-regular basis - though when working on a Mac it would sometimes save me!
Then a designer gave me the same advice I gave you.


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## slipe

If Photoshop had an auto-save I would disable it. Many people make a duplicate and rename it in case they accidentally save. That way they dont overwrite and lose their digital negative, which should never be altered. I dont usually do that, but I also never Save. That way I dont have to think about each save. I always Save as even if I want to save. So I think about each save when I do it. I also usually Save as with a different filename or file type fairly early on, so that subsequent saves wouldnt mess with the original anyway.

Even if I were in the habit of making a duplicate and renaming it, I would still be uneasy about forgetting and having an auto-save corrupt the original. And I would be concerned that it would somehow become enabled even if I disabled it.

I dont think most graphics people would be very happy with an auto-save in Photoshop. I dont think many graphics people work for two hours on something without multiple saves either.


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## plejon

Frankly, I don't see why anyone would opposed against a Microsoft Word style auto-save function.
- First of all, you can disable it, so it you don't want it, turn it off.
- Second, it's not an auto-save in the sense that it overwrites your original. It's an auto-recovery that saves your work, without impacting the original file. After a crash, you can either continue to work with the original version or recover your lost work, and save it under another name. Your original is never corrupted.
- Thirdly, I'm convinced that graphics designers would be happy to have an auto-recovery. They're not supermen. Designers never forget to save, and secretaries forget to save all the time? No way. Just like everyone else working with a computer, all designers will have lost part of their work because of a computer crash, a power failure, or any other reason. Being able to recover the work you've done, whether it's 2 hours of half an hour, is a great feature and should be implemented in any modern professional oriented software.


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## ATopSoft

Hello, plejon,
Could you tell me why our website can't give you enough confidence? Your advice will help us to improve our website.
Maybe because the English is not fluent? Sorry if it is so, we're not native English speaker.  

Our AutoSave is a common purpose utility that can save for most of the editors. But many of our customers are Photoshop users, the main reason is AutoSave can auto backup Photoshop documents before saving.

The link you mentioned is only an article, not the product homepage,
I can't post the homepage link because this forum doesn't allow new user posts url, so please get to the homepage from the left navigate panel in that article.

I don't want to say much on our products to avoid suspicion of advertising here, I suggest you give it a try.
If you don't like it, you can uninstall it completely. All of our products have no any spyware/adware.


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## plejon

Well, I'm not a native english speaker either, so that's not the issue. I just think the general look of the site is not very professional. The site has no company header, I couldn't find the company address on the site, the support forum seems empty, the graphics look outdated; it just looks like a quick and dirty job. That gives me the impression that the tool could be a quick & dirty job too.

As for the tool, I did download it and gave it a try. That's where some fundamental problems show up.
I understand you're trying to create a universal auto-save tool by sending the Ctrl-S key combination to a particular program. That system has some serious drawbacks if compared the the auto-recovery option in Word, which I consider a good example of what an auto-recovery should look like.
1) As slipe pointed out, you don't want to run the risk of overwriting your original before you're ready. The backup option in the atopsoft tool can solve this, but only to a certain degree.
2) Ctrl-S only saves the file that's currently open. If you have two psd open at teh same time, only the active one will be saved. The same is probably true if the Ctrl-S is send while you're in an screen that doesn't support it, e.g. the Extract utility


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## ATopSoft

> Well, I'm not a native english speaker either, so that's not the issue. I just think the general look of the site is not very professional. The site has no company header, I couldn't find the company address on the site, the support forum seems empty, the graphics look outdated; it just looks like a quick and dirty job. That gives me the impression that the tool could be a quick & dirty job too.


Thank you very much. You opinion is valuable.
How ever, I have much confidence on our products. 



> I understand you're trying to create a universal auto-save tool by sending the Ctrl-S key combination to a particular program. That system has some serious drawbacks


It's possible to make autosave for Photoshop use the Photoshop's builtin function instead of Ctrl-S, but seems Photoshop's COM interface is not well designed and may hang up Autosave.
We can't take that risk.



> if compared the the auto-recovery option in Word, which I consider a good example of what an auto-recovery should look like.


Seems you very like the auto recovery feature in Word.
But that's not enough.
Search "How can I make Word save or back up my document automatically" in Google, the first page on mvps.org is an article on the auto recovery feature.



> 1) As slipe pointed out, you don't want to run the risk of overwriting your original before you're ready. The backup option in the atopsoft tool can solve this, but only to a certain degree.


The backup in our Autosave will occur just before it prepares to save the document. That's to say, the newest backup file is always the original file that saved before the last autosave.



> 2) Ctrl-S only saves the file that's currently open. If you have two psd open at teh same time, only the active one will be saved. The same is probably true if the Ctrl-S is send while you're in an screen that doesn't support it, e.g. the Extract utility


This is not a big problem for most user. 

I'll thank you again for your opinion. That will help us to improve our website and products.


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## plejon

I agree with most points in the mvps.org article. However, in my day to day work, the "Always create backup" and "Save autorecover info" options have proven to be a good combination to rescue me 9 times out of 10 when I made a mistake or when Word crashed.


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## slipe

*ATopSoft* Thanks for the input. I wish all developers could come to the boards to discuss their software.

The Word recovery has always worked for me. Even so, I changed some of the defaults based on the article you linked.

I notice from your web page that your program makes a copy and renames it. That is a very good idea and most people competent in Photoshop (besides me) do that with every image anyway. Since most people also want to keep their original along with the image they worked on, your system doesnt add more bulk to the hard drive than any manual system as long as one remembers to delete stuff they dont want to keep. But making the copy and renaming it seems to be the only advantage of your program over just manually saving in Photoshop.

Adobe InDesign has a similar recovery to Word  it has saved my bacon on several occasions. But InDesign just links images and only the links are saved with the recovery file document. I often have multiple images open in Photoshop and run myself out of a Gig of RAM if Im not careful. I wouldnt really want backups of everything Im doing unless it could be compressed somehow. The InDesign recovery shows that Adobe is quite familiar with making one. Im guessing the constant write of large files to the HD would cause difficulty. Photoshop often uses virtual memory even when you havent used up all of the RAM allocated to it. Im guessing a Word-like recovery involving large image files would slow the computer considerably.

I wish Photoshop saved the full history with a PSD file. We had a discussion on another board and a method that would do that would also be good for a recovery file IMO. The thought was for Photoshop to keep a history similar to an action and store that with the PSD file if you elected to add it. That would also work well for a recovery file. You call up the original file and run all the actions in sequence and you could be where you were at the time of the crash without having the whole current document being constantly rewritten to the hard drive. Im not sure why the history itself couldnt do that. Of course if you lift the brush or stamp with every stroke you could still end up with a fairly large file. But it would be a lot more useful to me than just the modified image without the history.

Saving the file without the history isnt that much use to me. I often want to undo a filter and try something different. I often have to redo a difficult selection anyway since I lose the saved selection along with the rest of the history.


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## plejon

Give this man a beer ! A recovery file and a history, it can't get any better than that !

Now if we can just convince Adobe to implement it ...


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## ATopSoft

> The Word recovery has always worked for me. Even so, I changed some of the defaults based on the article you linked.


Glad to see that article is helpful to you.



> That is a very good idea and most people competent in Photoshop (besides me) do that with every image anyway.


Hey, this idea is from one of our customers. 



> But making the copy and renaming it seems to be the only advantage of your program over just *manually saving* in Photoshop.


"manually saving", you're quite right, it's so easy to press Ctrl+S to save the document manually, but there are still many people often forget to do that.
That's why most modern editors have builtin autosave feature, also that's why we developed this product called 'AutoSave'.



> Im guessing the constant write of large files to the HD would cause difficulty. Photoshop often uses virtual memory even when you havent used up all of the RAM allocated to it. Im guessing a Word-like recovery involving large image files would slow the computer considerably.


Slow when autosave on big files is the key issue that many Photoshop users explain why Photoshop doesn't support autosave feature.
You can search 'autosave photoshop' in the Google newsgroups and see how the others say.



> Of course if you lift the brush or stamp with every stroke you could still end up with a fairly large file. But it would be a lot more useful to me than just the modified image without the history.


I guess the psd file size will become several times bigger if it includes the history information. And such history information may aslo slow down the open speed in PS.


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## ATopSoft

plejon said:


> Give this man a beer ! A recovery file and a history, it can't get any better than that !
> 
> Now if we can just convince Adobe to implement it ...


Good luck.
The Photoshop users have been complaining about the lack of the autosave feature for several years, but Adobe haven't added that yet.
If you can persuade Adobe to add autosave, auto recovery or even history store, many Photoshop users will thank you.


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## starchild

I think after losing work one, or maybe a few times, we then learn to "auto save"
on our own  I know I have.

Also, I've gotten so I always make a copy (duplicate image) before I start doing something with a picture. 

My 6 year old grandaughter likes using Photoshop, the effects and special shapes and brushes, and I've got her doing that, too. I'll say "what do you do FIRST?" and she said "make a copy in case you mess up!"

It's not really that big a deal. I don't think I'd use auto save if the program had it. I'm always redoing and changing, too.

~ Carrie


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## slipe

> I guess the psd file size will become several times bigger if it includes the history information. And such history information may aslo slow down the open speed in PS.


Are you sure the history file is that large? Photoshop keeps it in RAM and it was my impression it wasnt that large  at least not several times the size of a large image. I would be willing to take a hit on storage space and opening time to keep the history with the file as long as there was a choice of saving the history.

I know actions are fairly small. A temp file of an action of everything you do to an image would allow you to rebuild the image exactly as it was at the time of the crash. And it would regenerate the history. An autosave of a series of actions as you work on the image would be of great value. Im sure Adobe has thought of that and there must be a downside.

Every time you release the left mouse button with the clone stamp or a brush you get another history entry. Does your program do a full save with each of those? My 7Mp images decompress to over 30Mb. I dont think I would want to do a 30Mb save every time I released the mouse button.

I find it more convenient to just Save as a psd when I decide to work on an image rather than work with a copy. I have to do that when I am finished with the image anyway, and if I am interrupted I can just Ctrl+s and have everything including my layers secure without affecting the original. If it was a psd when I open it I add a number to the file name to protect the original psd. But a psd is never a digital negative, which is what I never want to lose.


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## ATopSoft

> Are you sure the history file is that large? Photoshop keeps it in RAM and it was my impression it wasnt that large  at least not several times the size of a large image. I would be willing to take a hit on storage space and opening time to keep the history with the file as long as there was a choice of saving the history.


No, I'm not sure, only a guess.
The history is not same as actions.
Action is something like a macro recorder. It records what you have done (key press, mouse move/click, etc), and then replay it. Such record is very simple.
History is more complex than that.
The count of histories in RAM depends on your memory size.
I don't think you can have many histories if your RAM is only 256MB.


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## BWG

I found this discussion because I am trying to find a program to auto-backup PhotoShop and a 3D modeling program. Someone in another forum suggested ATopSofts backup program and I did a search to get some info on the application. It sounds pretty good and I also find it encouraging that someone from the developer is watching the boards and is willing to take the time to interact with us. I will certainly be giving the program a try.

I would also like to suggest to slipe that the history loss issue would be mitigated if you set the program to auto-save frequently, say every minute (or more frequently if possible). This way you can go back as far as you want without worrying about the history. The worst case scenario would be that you have lost 1 minute of work. Once you have finished the project you can simply delete any versions of the project you no longer need.

Some of the programs I looked at prior to finding out about this one were able to zip and save to external devices. If ATopSoft is not able to do this at present it might be a good idea to implement it in a future version, I know I would like to be able to keep my backups in this manner..


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## BWG

OK, I just downloaded a trial version of the atopsof software and ran a test. It works very well in PhotoShop. It is completely unobtrusive, that is, it does not disrupt the work-flow at all. I was not sure that it was working until I watched the little icon on the right side of my task-bar. It slides down and up when saving. The program is easy to set up by following the info in the HELP file. 

I am a bit unsure as to why, when I deleted PhotoShop from the application, and set the program to back up my 3D modeling program (the trial only works for 1 application) I was unable to set the number of backup versions I want to save. The program just kept saving the current version so no history was available.

I expect that the rep from Atopsof will comment on this below. I am writing to Atopsof tech support about this and if for some reason no reply is provided directly to this thread I will post any reply I get back from them.


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## ATopSoft

BWG said:


> I expect that the rep from Atopsof will comment on this below. I am writing to Atopsof tech support about this and if for some reason no reply is provided directly to this thread I will post any reply I get back from them.


Hello, BWG,

I've just sent the reply to you.
I would like to paste the reply here,

********************************
Though Autosave can auto save for almost all editors, it can only
backup documents for PhotoShop and MS Office, not any other applications.

What 3D modeling program do you use? If it's 3D studio max, maybe
it has internal autosave and backup feature builtin as one of our
customer said, see here,
http://www.atopsoft.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4

If the 3D program you using is another popular one, please tell us its
name and we can investigate to see whether we should add the backup
feature for it.

Don't hesitate to contact us whenever you have any other questions.
********************************


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## ATopSoft

BWG said:


> OK, I just downloaded a trial version of the atopsof software and ran a test. It works very well in PhotoShop. It is completely unobtrusive, that is, it does not disrupt the work-flow at all. I was not sure that it was working until I watched the little icon on the right side of my task-bar. It slides down and up when saving. The program is easy to set up by following the info in the HELP file.


Glad to see our product can help you.
You have read the help document to use Autosave? That's not very good from our developers' point. Can you tell me what trouble made you to read the help document? Which part of the user interface had puzzled you?
Your opinion will help us to make Autosave easier to use.
Thanks.



> Some of the programs I looked at prior to finding out about this one were able to zip and save to external devices. If ATopSoft is not able to do this at present it might be a good idea to implement it in a future version, I know I would like to be able to keep my backups in this manner..


That maybe another good feature though maybe not every users need it.  
We will do some investigation to see whether we should add this feature.
You can subscribe to our newsletter to get notified when we release any new version of Autosave.
The link is http://www.atopsoft.com/newsletter.html
Note select the correct product to subscribe to, the default one is another product, FileCake.


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## BWG

ATopSoft said:


> If the 3D program you using is another popular one, please tell us its
> name and we can investigate to see whether we should add the backup
> feature for it.
> 
> ********************************


I am using ArtCAM Pro


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## BWG

ATopSoft said:


> Glad to see our product can help you.
> You have read the help document to use Autosave? That's not very good from our developers' point. Can you tell me what trouble made you to read the help document? Which part of the user interface had puzzled you?
> Your opinion will help us to make Autosave easier to use.


Thanks for your quick reply.

It was not clear to me how to set up the program so I read the help file.

You might want to have a quick summary of how to use it open as part of the installation (or at least give people the option of opening the summary). Many other programs do this and I would think it would make things a bit easier for new users.

I found the help file well written, it was clear and easy to follow.


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## BWG

I have spent the better part of the day trying different programs and combinations of programs. I have come up with a number of different solutions to the issues of auto-saving files as well as saving archived versions of any programs files.

The solutions range from very simple to slightly involved in terms of set up.

EDL AutoSave 2.5 (cost $4) 
If your intent is to only autosave the current version of the file then the program to use is EDL AutoSave 2.5 (cost $4). This program will automatically save any file that is open on the PC at set intervals ranging from 1 minute to 60 minutes. It is seamless in that you do not need to do anything but open the program, open any program, create a new file, and save it once. Then each minute (or whatever) the program will save the file in its current version. http://www.keokitrask.com/EDL/AutoSaveInfo.htm

Memeo 1.50.1072 (cost $29.95) 
This is the most sophisticated of the 3 programs, it will create backup of versions of your file to any of a number of remote locations including anywhere you designate on your hard drive, a remote drive, and even to an internet location that you can rent from the publishers (I think you can also backup to a jump drive or a CD or DVD but I might be getting confused with another program - I tested more than a few today). The only draw back to this program is that you have to hit save in order to trigger an addition to the backup archive. To some this may not be an issue as the user can determine when they want to save on their own and simply hit save any time they choose. If you wish to autosave then you can use EDL AutoSave and Memo together. EDL will trigger a save every minute and Memo will archive the various versions. In addition Memo allows you to determine how many archived copies you wish to keep, I ran my tests with 5 copies and found that the first copy was deleted as the 6th was created. http://downloads-zdnet.com.com/Memeo/3000-2242_2-10443291.html?tag=zddl.nlppd&tag=nl.e530

ATopSoft AutoSave (cost $19) 
This is a nice little program that those who do a lot of PhotoShop might like to consider as it will auto backup and save versions of PhotoShop files. For programs other than PhotoShop it will simply save the current version of the file that is open. The advantage it has over EDL (apart from the auto archive of PhotoShop files) is that you can set your autosave frequency from 10 seconds to whatever (and everything in between). If you would like to autosave and archive more frequently than 1/minute then the combination of Memo and this program will do the job for you very nicely. http://www.atopsoft.com/products/autosave/


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## conceptcreature

I think part of the reason for a lack of an autosave option would be just the size of some Photoshop files. I work on large-scale graphics for exhibition spaces and billboards, and just OPENING some of those documents takes several minutes. So I'd assume part of the reason for no auto-save nor numerical upsequencing with versions would be to expedite your time, as well as not eating up all the memory on your hard drive.
The greatest solution I've practiced in assuring no loss of work (besides getting in the habit of saving) is a battery back-up. That way, even if the entire POWER GRID in your neighborhood goes down, you still have your computer up and running, and have enough time to save and continue to work while your infrastructure in your office zone is being worked on.


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