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Arnis Gubins
Arnis Gubins
Inspiring
June 12, 2013
Question

FM 11 autosave timer very flakey?

  • June 12, 2013
  • 2 replies
  • 616 views

Has anybody noticed that FM11's autosave timer intervals aren't strictly adhered to? I had a crash this afternoon (while working with Object Styles - love the idea, hate the implementation). Since I had autosave set to 5 minutes, I didn't think that I had lost that much. When I restarted FM and opened the file, FM politely offered to restore from the autosave file. The autosave file was over 25 minutes old! WTF? I lost a lot of work.

At that point, I started monitoring when the autosave appears in the folder. With a 5 minute setting, I was expecting the .auto.fm file to appear like clockwork. No such luck: 6, 14, 8, 11, 18, 7, 6, 6, 12, 3, 7, etc. minutes. Not a single one was at 5 minutes and it wasn't a constant interval either. Some were quite long. This is very dangerous and gives one a false sense of security.

I checked against FM6 and that was coming in fairly constantly at 5-6 minute intervals.

Has anybody else seen this behaviour? Have you checked?

One more thing that has been silently screwed up behind the scenes... Engineering QC doesn't seem to exist for some products.

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    2 replies

    Bob_Niland
    Community Expert
    Bob_NilandCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 12, 2013

    > ... The autosave file was over 25 minutes old! WTF? I lost a lot of work.

    Just e-file an FOIA request with the NSA. They'll quickly send you a keylog file, complete with mouse coordinates, for any period of time you need .

    > I was expecting the .auto.fm file to appear like clockwork. No such luck: 6, 14, 8, 11, 18, 7, 6, 6, 12, 3, 7, etc.

    The surprising number in there is "3". I can think of any number of system-level and/or app reasons why an AS might get stalled, but none, other than an massive system clock problem or an Adobe bug, for why it might be early.

    The way we use FM7.1/Unix, it crashes a lot, as one might infer from my username here. We gotten in the habit of frequent File > Save, and not relying on AS.

    Of course, sometimes it crashes during the Save. Fortunately, Adobe seems to be using a temp/rename scheme where the written tempname.fm file doesn't replace the former realname.fm until it has been successfully written.

    Jeff_Coatsworth
    Community Expert
    Jeff_CoatsworthCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 12, 2013

    IIRC, didn’t somebody notice that during the beta? I seem to remember reading a post about .auto files…

    Arnis Gubins
    Arnis GubinsAuthor
    Inspiring
    June 12, 2013

    Nope. I just checked my email archive.

    I sure hope that this might be a system specific thing, but otherwise, I urge you to check if it's behaving properly. Otherwise, you might be in for a nasty surprise, if ever you have a crash (which also seems to be increasing with every product release).

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