Hello, I wanted to bring up a possible issue that I've noticed about Krita that I believe has caused
lot's of people grief by mistake, please forgive me if I get some details wrong I don't have many hours "logged" in Krita
yet its just something I got bit by, and judging by forums and chat around Krita I'm not alone.

The way I understand the auto-save system is it is designed to help with recovering from crashes, something art
programs are notorious for, and it does help with this from what I've seen, if Krita stops abruptly the auto-save will be
presented in the filesystem and to the user.

There are a few unfortunate problems with this system from what I can tell,
perhaps the most alarming of which is that it does not actually do auto "saving" like what most people expect.
It seems to me that Krita's "auto-saves" in fact are a kind of crash redundancy and gives very little care to what if,
the user wanted to recovery from an event that wasn't strictly crash related.
By this i mean Krita seems to be very... Haphazard I'll call it, in the way it goes about cleaning up auto-saves,
a few of the events that cause auto-saves to be deleting I can see is, closing Krita cleanly, hitting "Discard all"
when prompted for recovery, closing an open Krita file (may be specific to unnamed files not sure yet).

There could be more but basically Krita is very quick to clean up these "auto-saves" in ways the user doesn't expect
and I think it's being mistaken for a system that helps save the user from unfortunate mistakes and circumstances when
in reality it's just a crash-recovery tactic, and even then you are only 1 wrong click away from disaster.
This is worse in the case of unnamed files, personally I think, last night I chose a location to save a file, and was repeatedly
saving it and mistakenly thought it was being saved properly because the program was not complaining, probably because
I may have tried to save to a non-existent directory or /tmp.

Generally with an auto-save system I wouldn't have been to bad off, but with Krita's auto-save system I would guess that
when I cleanly closed Krita the auto-save was deleted or replaced, or maybe was gone hours before I closed Krita who knows.

I probably could have been less careless but I think it's a common enough occurrence to consider reworking the system slightly
to be more forgiving, also options, options is always good.
Auto-saves have a tendency to take up a bunch of space if left uncheck but I think given how much work is put into artworks that
is difficult to replicate that it would be worthwhile having the defaults store multiple backups that are not deleted so easily would
be of a massive benefit to users in general.

Side note, it's also possibly users (me) hit "no" when the "Do you want to save your work" popup, purely out of the fact that you
wouldn't want to save stray brushstrokes and modifacations if you know you saved only a few moments ago.

Autosaves is a system meant to be only protecting you from losing progress on a unexpected Krita closing, because there is a whole, separate system for backups.

By default, one previous version of your file is stored in file name.kra~. If you change it's name to otherName.kra you can normally open it. This should protect you from losing progress when crash occurs on saving. In the settings you can change it to have more backups at the same time, it store them elsewhere.

I don't think it's needed to protect users from themselves and making bad decisions like clicking buttons "discard all changes", working on unsaved documents, not saving along the way or saving to temporary directory, as these feel careless. I'm just not sure if it's a good idea to spend time and effort to let people do careless things and make bad decisions.

wojtryb wrote:Autosaves is a system meant to be only protecting you from losing progress on a unexpected Krita closing, because there is a whole, separate system for backups.

By default, one previous version of your file is stored in file name.kra~. If you change it's name to otherName.kra you can normally open it. This should protect you from losing progress when crash occurs on saving. In the settings you can change it to have more backups at the same time, it store them elsewhere.

I don't think it's needed to protect users from themselves and making bad decisions like clicking buttons "discard all changes", working on unsaved documents, not saving along the way or saving to temporary directory, as these feel careless. I'm just not sure if it's a good idea to spend time and effort to let people do careless things and make bad decisions.

I understand,
I am aware of the backup system and I believe it works as intended,
the only thing is, I kind of feel like it's very easy to have the auto-save delete itself, and in
cases where the backup system doesn't fill the use case, or in some cases where the backup
system doesn't work at all I think it burns a lot of users.
I don't really see it as "saving users from themselves" with what I particularly mean.

It's more the fact that the system exists, and it exists for a purpose, to kept prevent loss of work,
and just a few small changes would dramatically improve it's effiectiveness in unfortunate cases,
whether its carelessness or, say a program with the filesystem or Krita that wasn't picked up by
either the program or the user.
I don't think a lot is lost by making a small change like say, keeping old auto-saves in 1 folder rather
than aggressively cleaning it up.

It's really about helping people with times work could have been saved and the misunderstanding
of the purpose of the auto-save.

I mean there is also an edge case scenario where a user could mistakenly perform an action that would
inadvertently delete the backup, at that point if the backup hasn't been saved properly it may not
be available if say, another crash were to occur.
This is maybe a bit "careless" but I think the system could be improved slightly to make it better across
the board.

I believe you will have to wait for a comment from a developer then. I may not have full knowledge of why those decisions were made.

So what you purpose is to not delete autosaves at all, and keep one for each artwork you create?
I guess that the reason why it's not happening now is that it would result in a hidden folder growing fast with each artwork you create, while you already should have a valid backup of it. I don't know why do you think the backup would not work.

Anyway, I may not be able to help here. Maybe one of the developers will answer you better.

wojtryb wrote:I believe you will have to wait for a comment from a developer then. I may not have full knowledge of why those decisions were made.

So what you purpose is to not delete autosaves at all, and keep one for each artwork you create?
I guess that the reason why it's not happening now is that it would result in a hidden folder growing fast with each artwork you create, while you already should have a valid backup of it. I don't know why do you think the backup would not work.

Anyway, I may not be able to help here. Maybe one of the developers will answer you better.

It is a very edge scenario if I'm honest backups should work the majority of the time.
When it doesn't work it very much sucks,
yes one solution I would propose is not deleting auto-saves,
but there are other alternatives like changing when auto-saves are deleting, maybe keeping
more than 1, keeping them for a few days instead of immediately deleting.
I only even realized was because I started a new project I thought I named, and saved (multiple times),
I also remembered seeing an auto-save, and that's when I got caught off guard, when both were gone.

I will wait for more thoughts from others.

mallchad wrote:I also remembered seeing an auto-save

That's probably the root of the confusion "seeing an auto-save".
Autosave files shouldn't be seen on the file explorer. On Linux, they start by a dot, and it hides them by default to the user.
I can guess on Windows (maybe not on Mac, because afair; Mac explorer also use the same "hide if start by a dot" convention) this files appears around while painting and might be understood by users as extra-backup or safety net... while this file are deleted each time a saving is a success or user discard save on quit.

Deevad wrote:

mallchad wrote:I also remembered seeing an auto-save

That's probably the root of the confusion "seeing an auto-save".
Autosave files shouldn't be seen on the file explorer. On Linux, they start by a dot, and it hides them by default to the user.
I can guess on Windows (maybe not on Mac, because afair; Mac explorer also use the same "hide if start by a dot" convention) this files appears around while painting and might be understood by users as extra-backup or safety net... while this file are deleted each time a saving is a success or user discard save on quit.

I think this is probably my main problem, mostly a semantic problem.
But I guess instead of putting effort into making it more "clear" it might make more sense to embrace the confusion, so to speak.