I’m reading the manual about Auto-Save in Dorico, and have reached the part on when you have multiple projects open.
Nowhere in this explanation do I see where Dorico will not Auto-Save if there have been no changes to the file. It only says it will auto-save at the interval designated in Settings.
It makes no sense to save a file every 5 (or however many) minutes if there have been no changes to that file.
We users of Dorico will frequently open a file and do work, then leave it open for several hours (even days for some of us), and to have it do an auto-save every 5 minutes during this period is not needed.
If Dorico does NOT do an auto-save if there have been no changes, then you need toi update your online description of auto-save. If it DOES do auto-save regardless of whether there have been changes to the file, then you need to change that behavior to eliminate autosaves if the file has not been changed.
Because that’s not what Dorico does. The manual exactly describes Dorico’s auto-save behavior: it auto-saves the currently activated project at the designated time interval. (Edit: or perhaps it is as Ben points out below, so ignore this part).
Don’t take this the wrong way, but to me it makes no sense to leave an app like Dorico open for days on end when you’re not using it. But I’m one of those guys who shuts everything down at the end of the day, so that might just be me.
I’m curious why the current behavior is problematic to you? If you leave Dorico open without using it for hours (or days) I’m assuming you’re not using your computer at all in that time, because otherwise Dorico would just needlessly take up resources. So why bother about the auto-saves? (If , but I’m just guessing here, you noticed that Dorico prevents your computer from going into sleep mode, that’s not because of auto-save but because of the audio engine. More info here.)
Also, you probably know this since you’ve read the manual, but perhaps it’s good to point out that an auto-save doesn’t overwrite your actual project file. It just creates a separate file in Dorico’s auto-save directory that gets moved to the trash when you close the project.
According to what I’ve read, Dorico will not keep more than 5 auto-saves. I assume it will overwrite the oldest with the newest.
I guess to find out if it does do the auto-save every 5 minutes, we should check the date/time stamp of the latest 5 autosaves to see if it saved when there were no changes.
I haven’t done that yet. But in either case, they should update their online manual.
