I Love/Hate Automatic Save

Posted May 10, 2010 * Comments(5)

I’m guessing if you’re like me you have a love/hate relationship with Automatic Save. I love it when it saves my bacon by saving a copy of a drawing before it gets corrupted but I hate it when it interrupts me while I’m looking at a large drawing. I am going to show you a couple of tricks for controlling Automatic Save so it works with you, not against you.

The secret is this little command called SAVETIME. Type SAVETIME on the command line and set it to 0 (zero) to turn Automatic Save off. Set SAVETIME to any other number and that will be the number of minutes between Automatic Saves.

For example if you want to open a large drawing but don’t want Automatic Save to interrupt you every few minutes, set SAVETIME to zero. Be sure to set SAVETIME to another number after you close the large drawing to turn Automatic Save back on.

If you want to get all fancy, you can make a macro in a toolbar or Tool Palette to toggle Automatic Save on and off.

I stole the code from the Properties button and modified it to toggle Automatic Save on and off: 

$M=$(if,$(and,$(>,$(getvar,savetime),0)),^C^Csavetime;0,^C^Csavetime;10)

Do you have any tips or tricks for working with Automatic Save?

5 Comments so far

  1. toomanytribbles on May 11th, 2010

    i never depended on autosave to ‘save the day’.
    i just hit that save button a lot.

  2. Marti on May 12th, 2010

    Nice tip,
    I had written not so long ago a tip on how to find and reuse te autosave files in case AutoCAD doesn’t find them by itself.

    You can find it Here

  3. John Evans on July 2nd, 2010

    Nice article. I still feel the same way about it as you after 18 Years. I used to have F2 overridden as Save/SAVETIME. This way Savetime was always updated. Now I have just developed a good habit of save vs check savetime.
    The most effective way I have found is a Hammer. Yes a Hammer. I threaten to beat the snot out of the laptop regulaly, and it seems to respond to it well.

  4. Tharwat on August 1st, 2010

    Here is my Autolisp File that toggle
    between 0 to 10 .
    (defun c:saveme (/ oldsave)
    (setq oldsave (getvar “savetime”))
    (if (> oldsave 0)
    (setvar “savetime” 0)
    (setvar “savetime” 10))
    (princ)
    (alert “This program made by Tharwat Al Shoufi”)
    )

  5. Richard on August 12th, 2010

    Our files are stored on an Intranet, and it sometimes takes a long time to open/save to it. I’ve set my Autosave to save to my harddrive, which takes far less time to save to. It saves the file every 20 minutes and I barely notice it happens, but it’s wonderful when it saves my butt after a crash.

Leave a reply