Dorico crashed, lost 40 minutes edits

After I created a good looking layout and a page with new entered lyrics, Dorico crashed. Opening the program showed me that all my 40 minute edits where gone. I checked the backup folder but there were no auto saved versions. Is there a place to set auto save to every 5 minutes or so to avoid this from happening?

I’m afraid Dorico does not yet have an auto-save feature: it has an auto-backup feature that stores multiple copies of the project based on the last n times you saved, but it doesn’t save on its own periodically, I’m afraid. I’m sure we will add that capability at some point soon.

If you have a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports corresponding to the crash, please email it to me (don’t post it here on the forum), and we’ll take a look to see if we can figure out what went wrong.

I’m sorry you lost a lot of work.

There are no reports of the Dorico crash as far I can see.

I would definitely move autosave up on the list. I haven’t lost anything of significance yet due to paranoid saving style, but it would be a form of assurance to provide users with a safety net as Dorico undergoes so many changes so quickly. It would seem to be a pretty straightforward feature when compared to engraving rules…

Autosave that is not 100% reliable is worse than useless - and Sibelius has failed to achieve that for years (both before and after Daniel’s time).

As a programmer, I would say "it’s very straightforward when you don’t need it because everything is working fine. But it something starts to go wrong but the program hasn’t crashed yet and tries to autosave, it’s not straightforward at all!

For what it’s worth, when I had this problem with Sib 7.5 I used (and still use) the program “ForeverSave 2” (at least on my Mac), which definitely will save your file at whatever interval you specify and allow you to go back to any recent, previous versions…

  • D.D.

I use a mechanism (Dropbox) that Daniel recommended (originally contributed by Robert Puff) some 6+ years ago here: Using Dropbox to sync your Sibelius settings and scores - Scoring Notes

It’s worked well enough for me (haven’t lost work so far and since I have Dropbox’s packrat mechanism I have access to the previous file saves as well), but I rely on ctrl-S quite a bit. Perhaps Dorico could accomplish similar with Dropbox? (Not that Sibelius is the sole reference standard, but lots of other professional programs seem to be able to similar.)

Quoting from the article:

If there is ever a situation where a file is updated on one computer incorrectly and then synced, not to worry: with auto-save enabled, you can always go back and retrieve a previous version on a specific machine. (You do have auto-save enabled in Sibelius, right?)

I certainly hope that this technique is not disavowed now… :smiley:

Dorico crashed today when I deleted some independent (shift-M and Alt-Enter) time signatures. Daniel, do you want me to send you a crash log? If you do, where would I find it on Windows?

An auto-save feature would be much apreciated! :slight_smile:

You need to have enabled the creation of crash logs in advance if you’re on Windows 10, so you may well be out of luck in terms of sending me a crash log from that crash. The procedure is described in the FAQ thread under “Dorico is crashing. What do I do?”

Sorry, Daniel, I didn’t think about looking into the FAQ thread. You’re right, no crash log this time.

Daniel, do I need to enable this on Mac as well first? there wasn’t a crash report created when Dorico crashed some while ago.

No, on Mac there should always be a crash log generated, and there’s nothing specific you need to do in order to make that happen.

The only crash reports I see in that location seems to be related to Sibelius:

It would be easier to save often if saving were faster.

In Sibelius, I’ve resorted to a macro (in Keyboard Maestro) that runs every 90 seconds to hit Cmd-S; it works quickly enough that it doesn’t usually interrupt my work and I’m always protected in the event of a crash. In Dorico, the save process takes too long for that to be realistic. (In a 10-page score with four instruments, saving the 2.6 MB file takes several seconds.)

Yes, I hope that in general, the program will become a little faster with coming updates. It takes Dorico a lot of time to process notes entered with a midi keyboard and lyrics, which cannot be entered too fast otherwise characters will get lost.

In some cases the Save command is grayed out even after I have made a change.

Interesting, any particular operation you have done, which changed something but doesn’t allow you to save?

I’ll try to keep track of specific changes and report back, but I think it may have been changing layout options or the like.

Now you surprise me. As a one time programmer I too would have thought autosave was a fairly simple thing to implement, but what has surprised me was your quote above. Until well into this century I used Sibelius7 on an Acorn RiscPC (Remember them? The only computer fast enough to run the program!) and never had a single problem with the autosave. In fact I got so used to it that I kept forgetting to save when I switched to Notation and several times lost hours of work.

That’s why I’m here in fact. If Dorico has no autosave then for my purposes it will be no more use to me than Notation. The race is on, whoever adds (reliable) autosave first, wins! :mrgreen:

If you search the Sibelius forum you will find a regular stream of people for whom autosave (and backup saves) don’t work. Of course it works for some people (including me, FWIW).

Autosave is quite easy to implement “wrong”. The “right” scenario is to ask yourself “OK, so this 1-million line program has an unknown number of bugs with unknown consequences, but I need to access and save all the user’s data in a way that is guaranteed to work 100% of the time despite the fact that an unknown amount of the data structures might already be corrupted in memory, in unknown ways”. If that is “fairly simple”, then we have different definitions of “fairly simple!”