Dec 2025 Auto-Save did nothing for 24 hours

Forum|Forum|7 months ago
December 21, 2025
3 replies
585 views

I've been editing a project ( a multicam wedding) that was started weeks ago.

Btw I have 25 years NLE experience - 14 years on Premiere. Im on a Mac Studio near maxed out with dozens of gigs available on my boot drive, and lots of HDD and SSD drives attached with about 2Tb of storage.

As I often do when I start a new edition of an existing project, I renamed the project file and saved it. That was yesterday morning.

Today after about 10-14 hours of editing and being about 92% finished, I decided to connect some other drives. I (believe) I saved my project, but its possible I didnt. I didnt think much of it as I was tired and my auto-save is set to make saves every 15 minutes.

After quitting Premiere I ejected my drives and connected a new one. Then I finding what I was looking for, I reconnected the drives and booted up Premiere.

It didnt show me any previous versions of the edit except for the one initial made weeks ago. When I searched through all the usual places for the auto saves I found it had not saved ANY files since 24 hours ago when I made the initial file name change. And it only saved 3 iterations of the file. And it did so every 17 minutes instead of 15 minutes.

Thats it so far all the progress I had taking an assembly edit, to a nearly finished tighted, color corrected picture locked edit are gone. just gone.

My guess is while it had a folder selected in settings for auto-saves it never wrote to it.

BTW I'm being contained and mature but ADOBE: Your company is not worth the stock price if you're allowing basic and essential functions to malfunction like some startup company. Not saying thats whats happening but that would be true if it is.

Open to suggestions and questions.
-J

Performance or Stability

Stan Jones

Community Expert

@JSJcreative,

I feel your pain. There's nothing worse than losing work, for whatever reason.

I took a look at the issues, and did some new tests. It is working as expected for me on Win 11 PR 25.6.3 and Beta 26.1.1.4. And sometimes it has not worked, and you never determine why. I would create a test project, and see if autosave is working for you there, or if there is an ongoing problem. My routine setting is to the project directory (so it creates an autosave folder there), 5 minutes, and 20 versions. When I test it, I set it to 2 minutes. I create the project, and immediately save it. I have not found that you HAVE to do that save, but it's too easy not to just do it. I then import one clip to the project - i.e. the project has changed. Whether I now save it or not, the clock starts ticking for autosave. I do not worry about whether it takes it 2 minutes, a minute and a half, or 3 minutes. Now that autosave operates in the background, you don't see the popup. I keep windows explorer open on monitor 2 with the autosave folder open, and it populates with the new autosave. If autosave works, I make the clip a sequence and wait for the autosave again.

As you have, I'd be interrogating myself as to how the drive disconnecting/connecting could somehow have tricked my system or me into hiding the files. I'm Windows, and don't know Macs enough. But I once was doing a similar process, and tricked the operation system in misreading the file system. I eventually found the files but they were simply not visible (and not simply hidden).

My, "better next time" comment: as I think every expert user here who has looked at the autosave function, it is an emergency backup that, logically, is only rarely of primary use if you are doing what we advocate. Regularly do a "save a copy" (to another drive) or an iterative "save as." I frequently save projects, but I often forget. I do a "save a copy" every 30 minutes or so - and yes, I often forget. But at every important step, I make a special backup with a note added to the name that tells me the stage, e.g. "xyz precaptions 20251224.prproj".

The help guide for autosave is here:

https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere/desktop/get-started/preferences-and-settings/auto-save-preferences.html

Stan