Can someone tell me how to make photoshop ACTUALLY autosave?

[PolarBearon]

Please help.

I'm so sick and tired of Photoshop refusing to autosave. I lost hours of work last week so I made sure I had autosaving turned ON in the current version of Photoshop I was using. It's set to autosave every 5 minutes, but I can't find any autosave files anywhere. There are no files in the auto-recovery folder. Why? Why does it have to be so hard to find an autosave file? Why is there not an "open autosave folder" "load autosave" or "recover" button in the dropdown menu? Have you never played a video game before? Play one and take note of how it handles autosaving. It shouldn't be a nightmarish quest to recover a saved file. 

This is where they are supposed to be, right? \AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop (Beta)\AutoRecover

This folder is empty. There is not a single file in there of any type. Why? When I have autosave on every 5 minutes, why is it empty? 

When I google this people claim that if Photoshop crashes, it should automatically recover what you were working on. Well, it has never done that for me. Certainly not this time. Can someone please just for the love of god tell me how I can make sure Photoshop is actually autosaving? I NEEED this functionality, but I can't get it to work. I've worked in IT for a decade and I can't fathom why Adobe can, while being the biggest name in creative apps, be the most unstable and poorly designed environment known to man. Autosaving shouldn't need to even be turned on. It should just happen on its own. But even with maximum effort, I can't make it do it. 

These are my settings. Do you know what would be nice? If it would tell me WHERE the files are! I've spent more time trying to work this out than it would have taken to just start my project over. 

I'm frustrated to tears and so confused, and I don't know what to do. I can't keep losing work like this, it's killing me. Please just tell me what I need to do to make it autosave. 

Forgive the rant, I am losing it.

[kglad]

in the future, to find the best place to post your message, use the list here, https://community.adobe.com/

p.s. i don't think the adobe website, and forums in particular, are easy to navigate, so don't spend a lot of time searching that forum list. do your best and we'll move the post if it helps you get responses.

<moved from using the community bugs >

[D Fosse]

First of all: there is no point in looking for the files. You're not supposed to do that.

• If Photoshop crashes, the recovery file will come up automatically on next launch.
• If Photoshop closes normally, the contents of the recovery folder is deleted. You don't want to be flooded with recovered files every time you open the application, if everything works normally.

In other words - either it comes up on its own, or there's nothing there.

To initiate the autorecovery process, the file has to be saved to disk at least once. This is to prevent the process from running for every random file you open and then dismiss again without intending to keep it. Saving it tells Photoshop that this is one you want to keep.

[PolarBearon]

Then I don't understand why it didn't recover my file after the crash. And the file in question had been saved many times before the crash. 

[D Fosse]

I don't want to sound dismissive, but I haven't seen a crash in many years and so I can't test this. But this is how it's supposed to work. Try to save the file under a new name (Save As).

If you have frequent crashing, that's usually GPU-related. What GPU do you have? Is this a laptop with dual graphics? Dual GPUs may cause conflicts and is a known problem.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/troubleshoot-gpu-graphics-card.html 

[PolarBearon]

It's a desktop. And I have a rtx 3090.

[jane-e · Accepted solution]

@PolarBearon 

Years ago I got into two habits:

• Save manually every time I do something right (fairly often)
• Do an incremental save once or twice a day:
  Save, followed by Save As and add a number or the date to the filename. I move the older versions into an "archive" folder and eventually delete the older ones.

The newer .psdc format automatically saves versions and does what you are asking for. It requires that you save in the Cloud, which I prefer not to do.

Jane

[Severo5EE8]

Answers like this don't really help. I frequently save, but if photoshop for some reason decides to crash and corrupt my file in the process, and then doesn't do autosave (like it's supposed to do, and as every other creative app does, without having to check any boxes or folders,  and would be expected of the biggest creative company in the world) the fault is in the software and not the user. 

The fact that you got used to coping with the outdated software is not an excuse for Adobe. Please, stop replying with comments like yours when people are frustrated, and with good reason. Try a little empathy.

Have a nice day!

[D Fosse]

Ok, I don't know why autorecovery (not autosave) doesn't work for you. As I said further up, I haven't seen a crash in many years, so I can't test this or try to reproduce. But from all I hear it generally works as intended.

So I can only comment generally. You probably won't find it helpful, so you can stop reading here.

• You need to save the file to disk at least once.
• If Photoshop crashes, it's nearly always the GPU. Update the driver. If it's a dual GPU laptop, the two GPUs tend to conflict (and crash). Disable the integrated GPU.
• After a crash, the files you had open should reopen automatically on next PS relaunch. You're not supposed to "look for" the recovery folder. There won't be anything in it.

[jane-e]

Answers like this don't really help.

By @Severo5EE8

When an answer that helped someone else does not help you, you might want to consider starting a new thread where you will get help tailored to your issue.

Jane

Forum volunteer

[Anavelca]

I want to join your rant... Just lost couple hours of work because of this. Yes, I need to save more often, but I foget when I get into the flow. What am I supposed to do - set an alarm?!? Maybe Adobe, who gets paid subscription every month can set up autosave as all normal applicatoins do? It crashed on me, and when I opened Photoshop next time, the file was gone, no recovery information loaded. There should be a location where last 5 versions of your file are being saved, period. No "save more often", or "rely on the crash recovery thing" nonsense. So frustrated! Why After Effects does that (saving auto save information for your project) and Potoshop doesn't?!?!?!

[Stephen Marsh]

Yes, I need to save more often, but I foget when I get into the flow. What am I supposed to do - set an alarm?!?

By @Anavelca

Some have gone to that extent, having Adobe Bridge running in the background, with a script notice popping up every X minutes reminding them to save:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/reminder-to-save/m-p/10466042#M245264

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/automate-save-as-or-export-with-seque...

[Anavelca]

Yes, I know there might be various workarounds, crutches etc. to make something work, but imo, that is not how reputable software that costs good amount of money, paid to them every month, should operate. 

[D Fosse]

@Anavelca 

Actually, I'd be more immediately concerned with the crashing. That's not normal and points to a hardware/driver problem - usually it's the GPU.

FWIW, I haven't seen a crash in...it's so long ago I can't remember. Must be ten years at least, and I use Photoshop for a living 8 hours a day. The point is, there's nothing inherent in Photoshop that crashes. But it may trigger a crash, by making calls to advanced functions in the GPU.

[Anavelca]

I am happy for you that you have not seen a crash in such a long time, but I experience crashes every once in a while, on different computers, work and home. They all are good working computers. Regardless, GPU or not, autosave should be available for the software that claims itself to be an industry standard. It used to be available years back, I wish it stayed that way.

[AlanG6613]

I don't know if I've seen Photoshop 'crash' in a while, but it 'hangs and requires force-quit' a couple times a month. I'm pretty good at saving on the reg, I rarely lose work, but that's in spite of Adobe, never because of it. I also use Photoshop for a living 8 hours a day, and the user experience between PS and something like Clip Studio Paint is night and day. Rarely hangs, recovers work when it does mess up... I haven't seen Photoshop recover a file for me in YEARS, probably not since I was using pirated versions in the early 00s.

[Trevor.Dennis]

Alan, are you telling us that Photoshop sometimes hangs, but you don't then see ***-recovered.psd for all previously open files when you restart Photoshop?  That has always worked for me.

If you are doing this professionally, then I wonder if you are on a workplace network, and if yes, if that affects Autosave?

[AlanG6613]

I go into prefs and glare at that checkbox every time it happens, lol. I recently tried disabling it, restarting PS, re-enabling it, restarting PS, but if there are temp recovery files being generated in either AppData>Roaming>Adobe or in the assigned Scratch disk, then I cannot find trace of them. 

I sometimes am able to pull smart object .PSBs out of Windows' own Temp folder, oddly enough. You suck ass too, Windows, but you suck less than Adobe today. But there's a tip for my fellow frustrated that might be reading this, you might salvage something partial there.

I just did a little testing, creating a file, saving it once as a psd. Then making a change and waiting 15+ minutes, so the autorecover should kick in, right? 

Then force quitting photoshop from Task Manager. Waiting another 10 minutes and launching PS. Nothing. I even said please 😞

As for network, we're a small company and don't have a complex network architecture. All my files and folders are local, with remote backups pushed out daily.

One of these days I'm going to scrub my whole system and reinstall fresh. Again, small company, we're our own tech support. But first I'm going to have to go and manually export all kinds of preferences and presets, because another thing this professionally-priced, industry-leading product fails to do is save/import any presets automatically or as single-click. At least it never has in the past, I guess modern versions are supposed to? Colour me skeptical.

[Benjamin263537805jhi]

It's amazing something as basic as automatic autosave hasn't been added or at least, doesn't work properly on PS - and WITHOUT needing to save to cloud. 

I guess Adobe doesn't want us to own our own files?

[Anavel_000]

Posting again with the same issue from my work account. This is so annoying I have no words. Photoshop hanged with "unknown error" and I lost quite a bit of work. When I went back to my preferences the check mark on "Save recovery information" was not there even though I am SURE I had it checked. 

BRING BACK local autosave! This is ridiculous and shameful for the software that costs so much to have THIS bad of a user experience!