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