Settings - Autosave

Autosave automatically saves your project at regular intervals, helping protect your work from unexpected application crashes, power outages, or accidental changes. This feature maintains a history of saved versions that you can restore at any time.

Accessing Autosave Settings

Open the Settings window to configure autosave options and manage your autosave history.

Settings

Enable Autosave

Turns the autosave feature on or off.

• Default: On

When enabled, Composer automatically saves a copy of your project at the configured interval.

Autosave Interval

Controls how frequently Composer creates an autosave.

Choose a shorter interval if you make frequent changes and want maximum protection. Choose a longer interval if performance is a concern or your project changes infrequently.

Autosave History Limit

Sets the maximum number of autosave files to keep for the current project.

When the limit is reached, the oldest autosave file is automatically deleted to make room for a new one.

Autosave Retention Period

Sets how long autosave files are kept before being automatically deleted.

Autosave files older than the retention period are automatically removed, even if the history limit has not been reached.

How Autosave Works

When Autosave Triggers

Autosave only creates a new save file when the project has been modified since the last save. If no changes have been made to any component in your project, the autosave interval will pass without creating a new file.

This prevents unnecessary duplicate files and keeps your autosave history meaningful — each file represents an actual change to your project.

File Naming

Autosave files are named using the following format:

{ProjectName}.{Timestamp}.prj

For example, if your project is named MyShow.prj and an autosave occurs on January 15, 2025 at 2:30:45 PM, the autosave file would be named:

MyShow.20250115-143045.prj

This naming convention ensures files are sorted chronologically and makes it easy to identify when each autosave was created.

Storage Location

Autosave files are stored in the following location within the Composer application folder:

[Application Folder]\Projects\Autosave

This keeps your autosave files separate from your main project files while remaining easily accessible.

Automatic Cleanup

Composer automatically manages your autosave files based on two conditions:

1. History limit: When the number of autosave files exceeds your configured limit, the oldest file is deleted.
2. Retention period: Files older than the configured retention period are deleted regardless of the file count.

Both conditions are checked whenever a new autosave is created and when Composer starts.

Restoring from Autosave

To restore your project from a previous autosave:

1. Open the Settings window
2. Locate the Autosave History section
3. Select the autosave file you want to restore from the list
4. Click Restore
5. Confirm the restoration when prompted

Important: Restoring an autosave replaces your current project setup. This action cannot be undone. Make sure you want to revert to the selected autosave before confirming.

After restoration, the selected autosave becomes your active project, and the previous state is overwritten.

Deleting Autosave History

To manually delete all autosave history for the current project:

1. Open the Settings window
2. Locate the Autosave History section
3. Click Delete All History
4. Confirm the deletion when prompted

Warning: This permanently deletes all autosave files for the current project. This action cannot be undone.

Tips

• Set an appropriate interval: If you work on complex projects with frequent changes, use a shorter autosave interval (1–5 minutes). For simpler projects, a longer interval (15–30 minutes) may be sufficient.

• Balance history limit and retention: A higher history limit combined with a longer retention period gives you more restore points but uses more disk space.

• Check before major changes: Before making significant changes to your project, consider manually saving so you have a known good state to return to if needed.

• Review autosave history periodically: The Settings window shows your available autosave files with timestamps, making it easy to find a specific point in time to restore from.