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Move Autosave out of /tmp

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#1

Hello there

Worked remotely on a friend PC. I’ve just lost 4 hours of work, because of a system crash. Client is really upset, since I’m now missing a deadline.

Why is the location of blenders autosave folder located in tmp?

I mean that’s ram on most Linux systems.

And Autosave is vital for freelancers. It’s just if you’re working for a long time with blender weird coincidences will happen and not being able to rely on autosaves is a big issue.

Please change the deafult or at least put a warning somewhere, if it saves to tmp.

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Blender is not complying with common standards amongst linux-distros when it comes to filepaths
#2

And I hate to say it, but (in my opinion) stuff like this is unfortunately hurting the reputation of blender freelancers and blender as a professional software alike.

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#3

Seconded. Should be specified or created as default in a sub-folder of the location of the saved Blend file.

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#4

I agree, the default location temp save should be in the same folder as the blend file, like Krita’s defautl autosaving. In windows, the /tmp file goes… sometimes literally nowhere till you program it.

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#5

Hmmm not sure what you do, of there’s no saved file yet and also having it all over the place might cause confusion.

But as an option, this is not a bad idea

#6

In windows there isn’t such a problem, since tmp isn’t a memory folder. But for linux maybe something like ~/.tmp or ~/.blender_tmp, so it stays in user folder. Of course it will be the responsibility of the user to cleanup folder from time to time. The reasoning behind it being in the /tmp was to avoid user getting out of space due to a lot of autosaves as this is what happens in windows, getting 50+Gb tmp folders with a few weeks of temp files is very normal in professional workspace. As a TD I can’t recall how many times I wrote scripts and fixed this kind of problems on artist machines.
So in the end, if you are a making a living as professional user, one of the first things you do, is setup blender, and this includes setting keymaps, addons, navigation preferences and system paths.

2 Likes
#7

Have a default autosave location that’s not in a location you have to hunt for :wink: Am not sure if the Data - Temporary Files location in Preferences - File Paths is the same; if not, an extra field could be added here to query such a location along with a limit on the number of automatic backup files as not to fill up your storage.

#8

Having 1 file per day, a second that is saved each hour and a third being continuously saved might also be a good idea so you have some older files to get back to whole preventing total overflow in regards of storage.

#9

Working 4 hours straight without saving your work once, not being mean but that’s really not pro.

1 Like
#10

Getting paid to work with blender means I’m a professional user.

And Autosaves in Blender are reliable if set up correctly. My main problem being I work a lot with in browser office tools, that save continuously and that leads to bad habits in offline tools like blender especially if I’m really focused on something.

#11

I question that assertion.

On Linux, Blender will use the value of the environment variable TMP for saving temp files if it is set. If you don’t like the default value, set TMP or set the temporary file path in User Prefs.

On Windows, I believe the environment variable is TEMP, but I can’t check that at the moment.

No offense, but working for 4 hours without saving is not being professional. Getting paid doesn’t change that.

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#12

I’ve made a stupid mistake, yes. I know.
And as a matter of fact having made every mistake in the book at least once is for me kind of a defining trait of a professional user.

But I digress. This is about a tool that is supposed to help reduce impacts of mistakes made by users or programmers (crashes can be caused by both). If both were perfect, we wouldt not need autosave.

And I actually made a survey on a mastrodon node with mostly Linux-users and over 50% had their tmp in RAM.

And the majority of the remaining can’t recover files from their tmp location after a system crash.

One even said “hmm. I seriously don’t know of any other application that does that…” after having asked for the reason of my survey.

#13

sorry but u made terrible workflow mistake… and is not blender fault… blender have 2 independent backup system… 1 is in tmp… the other is versioning that u can setup how many u want to keep. basically it works in such way that if u set it to 3 for example it will save original file… + 3 backup copies that are saved… usually the first is last time u hit ctrl+s the next one is i think last 10 min and the next one is 30 min and the next is like 1-3h… i never really digged how it works… but that is in my case usuall timestamp on those files :slight_smile:

#14

Since I usually use the daily compiled version of blender,
Will often crash, so I developed a habit of saving at any time.
However, if you suddenly lose power while saving, the file will be broken and cannot be recovered.

I have encountered this situation before.
I only set up to save two versions, both versions are broken, and I was very depressed at the time.
Fortunately, there is a file that is not very far away from the auto-save file.

The saved function does not know if it can be optimized to avoid damage to the original file when the power is off.

I don’t really like auto-save. When the scene is very large, saving it on a mechanical hard drive will make the computer slow.
I think Blender especially needs a function like zbrush and maya that can be automatically saved in the event of a crash, which can largely avoid the user’s loss and reduce the risk of serious bugs.

#15

I feel like this is a non-issue, seeing that you can just set it up once in your preferences and be done with it.
Whenever I (re-)install a {new) version, I just set it up to my scratch drive.

#16

I just want to point out the point of an autosave.
That is, to protect users in the case of a crash.

Many crashes impact the entire system (eg, power loss, catastrophic overheat, angry chainsaw attack). That is a problem. However, autosave ensures that you don’t lose much work. Even if you don’t save often (easy to do if you don’t have the right habits), you won’t lose a ton of work.
By saving to /tmp/, blender is making its autosave worse than useless at protecting data loss from total system crashes. I work with a graphics card that sometimes dies without warning. I know that blender has an autosave, and so I set my interval to be low and expected it to work without me needing to save frequently. When my card recently went down, I restarted my computer, expecting Blender to have autosaved. Except that, because of this issue, the autosave had been deleted. It only served to lure me into a false sense of security.

This problem has a ridiculously simple solution. Save to /var/tmp instead of /tmp. /var/tmp files are persistent through shutdowns, but are still allowed to be cleaned. This change would only help: there is no situation in which it hurts the user. It would literally take less time for someone to change the destination directory to /var/tmp than it would for someone else to write about why it is the responsibility of the user to change this folder every time they boot up.

3 Likes
#17

I cannot stress this enough, but this is not a place to put blame.

  • I know it’s possible to change the deafult.
  • I know it’s possible to save.
  • I know it’s better to not rely on autosaves.
  • … I know blender is not a terrible software because of that choice.

But my point remains:
It’s a very odd choice, because it makes Autosaves voulnerable to system crashes and it is not compliant with software standards and changing that deafult will probably improve the usefulness of this feature.

1 Like
#18

So what if someone makes a mistake one time because of having a hard day? This happened to me today and I lost 8hrs of work. The purpose of autosave is to automatically save not save to tmpfs which may as well be /dev/null. My battery backup also failed.

#19

In Linux /tmp folder is volatile. A kernel panic, power outage, or a system reboot will mean loss of files.
On Linux Trash system should be used by default in Blender. Also for Trash system you will surely have a very accessible icon/widget somewhere by default on any Linux distro. Added to this is that you can set the expiration date for files in Trash system, so that they are automatically deleted according to their age.

#20

I also just lost work because of this bug. It shows a lack of understanding of Linux to save important data to /tmp. It’s in the name: temporary.

I filed a bug for this here: ⚓ T93843 Blender on Linux saves autosave and session files to /tmp, resulting in data loss on a system crash

1 Like