Automatically Backup Files to Different Location than Manually Saved In

[woo30766569w3fz]

Good afternoon,

I recently had my entire pc crash while saving a file in photoshop, and the file's contents were completely unrecoverable afterwards. Luckily, I only lost about an hour, but I would like to avoid this happening to a photo I may spend longer on in the future.

I have autosave setup to save every 5 minutes, but if the autosave saves to the same place that manual saves save to, the backup file risks being corrupted/overwritten by a bad manual save like in my case. 

Is it possible to have the autosave save the files to a location that is different than the one I am currently working in? For example, if I am working on a file saved on my desktop, could I have the autosave save a backup of this file to C:/PSBackups?

Attached is a photo of my file handling settings.

Thank you for any help you can provide

[woo30766569w3fz]

It's a bit scuffed, but I made a Windows bat file to automatically take the files in one directory and save them in another directory, I think it works fine for me so far.

If you want to copy what I did, all you have to do is take this psab (photoshop autobackup attached below) .txt file and change the file extension to .bat. Bat files are executables that Windows can run without needing to download any external software. If you can't see the .txt at the end of the psab, turn on file name extensions under view in the top middle of any folder. 

I put my psab.bat in C:\scripts (it doesn't exist, you'll have to make it), but you can put it wherever you want. 

Now, you will want to open task scheduler, you can just hit the windows key and search task schduler and it should appear.

Right click on "Task Scheduler Library" and click "Create Task..."

Copy the photos attached, and be sure to modify them where appropriate to suit your own setup.

Unfortunately, a small window/console will appear every 10 minutes and then disappear. It's not the end of the world, but it's annoying and not a solution you want to stick with forever. You can convert bats to exes, but I can't upload the file, and I don't want to write a tutorial on how to do it. 

[D Fosse]

Autorecovery does not go to the same location as the file. It's a dedicated folder normally associated with the Windows TEMP directory. The autorecovery file is not the same as your working file.

The key to understanding how this works is that the content of this folder is deleted in a normal orderly shutdown. If Photoshop crashes, however, it does not have time to delete it.

When Photoshop starts up, it looks in this folder. Normally, there won't be anything there, and so it just moves on. After a crash, however, there will be, and whatever is there will be opened automatically.

For autorecovery to work, the file has to be saved to disk at least once. This is to eexclude files you just open and dismiss again.

In other words, your working file corruption should not affect this. It's a different file! Maybe you hadn't previously saved the file, or perhaps you were just very unlucky with the timing, so that the recovery file was corrupted too in the crash.

[woo30766569w3fz]

I've had this happen before, where an image I was working on during a crash was saved as a -recovered.psd. Luckily, I didn't lose either the recovered image or the image I was working on. 

This time I assumed the same thing would happen, but I couldn't find a recovery image or anything relating to the image in the temp folder. I save pretty regularly, so I might've just gotten unlucky. It's also possible that a recovery/temp image was saved in the temp folder and I just missed it. 

[D Fosse]

Most people mistankenly assume that they have to go and look for it. You don't. Either it opens automatically on next launch - or there's nothing there.

[Stephen Marsh]

As an introduction to the topic, there is a default script that ships with Photoshop, designed for use with the Script Events Manager:

A custom script could be made to save as a copy a layered PSD to another location for safety (not as a flattened JPEG next the source image). This would obviously take extra time as every time the main image is saved, the script would be automatically triggered to save as a copy elsewhere.

[woo30766569w3fz]

That's good to know about, I'll check it out and see what I can do

Thanks!

[woo30766569w3fz · Accepted solution]

I found a script online and I verified that it works,  here is the link to it:

https://www.deviantart.com/ruckenfigur/art/Photoshop-Save-and-Auto-Create-Backup-Copy-Script-7007983... 

The script saves a backup of the file with a timestamp in the same directory, but you can modify it to do what you want.