Autosave behaviour

[Dmitry_Chuvelev]

Hi everyone,

I’d like to clarify what seems to be a serious limitation in Cubase Auto Save, and check whether we are interpreting its behavior correctly.

As far as I understand it, Auto Save in recent Cubase versions only creates an automatic save when the project has actual unsaved changes in the main project sense — in other words, when there is at least one action that appears in the regular project Undo history.

The problem is that during mixing, a lot of important work happens outside that main project Undo history. For example:

• moving faders

• changing pan

• inserting or removing plugins

• changing routing

• other MixConsole operations

These actions belong to the MixConsole undo history, which is separate from the main project undo history.

So the practical issue seems to be this:

If I spend a long time mixing and only make MixConsole changes, but do not perform any edit that affects the main project Undo history, Auto Save may not trigger at all. If Cubase crashes in that situation, those mixing changes may be lost, even though a lot of work was done.

That behavior feels risky, because mixing is still project work, even if nothing was moved in the Project window itself.

So my questions are:

1. Are we understanding this correctly?

2. Does Auto Save really ignore changes that exist only in the MixConsole undo history?

3. Is there any workaround for this, apart from manually saving all the time?

4. Has Steinberg ever commented on whether this is intentional?

And one feature request:

It would be very useful if Auto Save could also be triggered by meaningful MixConsole changes, not only by changes that appear in the main project undo buffer. At the very least, it would be great to have an option for that in Preferences.

Because from a user’s point of view, fader moves, insert changes, routing changes, and other mixer decisions are just as important as edits in the Project window — and losing them after a crash is a real problem.

Would be glad to hear whether others have tested this and seen the same behavior.

[Johnny_Moneto]

A quick test on a project, where I only changed a volume fader in the console, revealed that Cubase (15.0.20) creates an AutoSave also in this circumstance.

Have you tested yourself? Did you get a different result?

[Dmitry_Chuvelev]

I have not tested this in the very latest version. I only have the impression that I started noticing this around the time when Auto Save began storing files in a separate folder. So if this has already been fixed, that would be great.

It is also possible that what I experienced was just a coincidence. Maybe, before the crash, something in my system was already interfering with file saving, and the auto-saves were missing not because of the Auto Save logic itself, but simply because something had already started to fail and files were no longer being written correctly.

So if Auto Save works properly in your case, then I hope this was never really an actual Cubase issue in the first place.

Many thanks.

[Johnny_Moneto]

You are always free to test it yourself in order to see if it works on your system. In fact, I would even recommend to do so.

[Reco29]

Hi,
here’s an overview how Autosave works:

Auto Save & Bak Files – Documentation and Best Practice

Auto Save & Bak Files – Documentation and Best Practice The Auto Save function provides an additional safety net by creating automatic backups of an open project in the background. This is very helpful in case you experience a crash or you want to go back to a project state which has not been saved by a regular cpr file. Unfortunatly, the manual is very brief and therefore misses crucial information about Auto Save and how it works. In order to avoid being at risk to accidently lose parts of y…

Naming-schemes of bak files can be misleading: Although slight modifications of the mix don’t appear as a name tag - they still trigger an auto save and are saved accordingly.
Moreover, there are some differences between Mac and Windows (see link).

[Dmitry_Chuvelev]

I was just wondering - if some of you experienced at some point the same behaviour as I did. Like inserting plugins, moving faders, etc… Getting a crash and realizing that the last autosave was made only when you made some changes on the project (not mixer) and it was made long ago - more then the autosave period in settings. If no one had this behaviour - then I have to investigate further.

Thanks.