Hi,
I’m having problems with Dorico every now and then freezing for about 5-10 seconds. I’m not sure what that is (suggestions welcome), I’m in write mode // galley view only, and have condensing switched off.
Thinking it might have something to do with auto-save, I looked at the autosave folder, and seeing some unexpected behaviour (which may or may not have anything to do with my freezing problem):
My autosave is set to 5 minutes. At the time of the screendump, there are (and have been for more than 5 minutes) unsaved data in my project, but the last autosave is 15 minutes old. In fact, 11:35 corresponds to the last time I actually explicitely saved the file.
To test this, I saved again at 11:56 (not shown) and sure enough, another auto-save file showed up.
So it seems as if Dorico is autosaving whenever I save (i.e. when I least need it!) but not otherwise.
Comments/help appreciated!
Justus
Additional info：I now notice that the number of backups is 20, which is the setting for “maximum number of backups”. Surely Dorico doesn’t stop auto-saving when you reach 20, but drops the oldest auto-save to make room…???
That’s the Backup folder, not the AutoSave folder, and it’s working exactly as designed.
See a previous explanation at Dorico is not backing up! is it? - #2 by pianoleo, for instance.
Please also see the entry in the manual for autosave: Auto-save and the entry for backup: Project backups
Two different functions that work in tandem.
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O, gosh! I never realised that. As often, the answer to my question is something really obvious that I hadn’t even considered mysel.
I tend to save myself every few minutes, so with auto-save set to 5 mins, it’s no surprise that I never noticed they were different!
How confusing, though, that the backup folder is mentioned immediately under the auto-save option in the Preferences (with no mention of there also being an autosave directory).
Now I’m going to see if I can match my freezes to the Autosave (which I’ve found under ~/Appdata/roaming/Steinberg/Dorico3.5/Autosave
I do notice that the Autosave files are 20 MByte large (as are my project files), which make me wonder whether Autosave can be designed more efficiently (i.e. to only backup key data, or even just keystrokes/events since the last backup). Unless of course my freezers are entirely unrelated to Autosave, in which case I don’t care.
Anyway, thanks for the help, Leo. I do tend to search the forum before I post, but find it tricky to find something I’m interested in.
Making autosave files that are ‘deltas’, just containing the changes since last time, would be a huge amount of work and probably require changing the whole data structure of Dorico. And how would you restore it? Import ‘change’ files to older version?
If your files are 20Mb, that suggests you’ve got a lot of playback data from VSTs. If you don’t think you should have that, then try Applying the Silence Playback Template, and then re-apply your chosen Template.
But yes, it’s expected that autosave will hang things while it’s saving.
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Thanks Benwiggy,
That is a nice trick! Reduced the file from 19.7 to 5.9 Mbyte, so that will hopefully help. Makes me wonder where all that “playback data” comes from (I don’t usually do anything with playback myself).
