Auto Save not set by Default!!!! Arrrrgggggg

Sorry to appear angry but I just lost an hour of my life. Here I am rolling along converting Kick drums into Midi notes with the new Drum replacer (Awesome) Then using Cal to change the Hits with the Legato CAL routine then Changing notes to play the SI Bass Synth and everything is freaking awesome. Then I try to Bounce a 2 Minute clip of it (I had saved a while back) and then the Audio engine drops out and Sonar crashes. I go looking for a backup and there is none. I'm used to Pro tools where by default it saves a few backups at least. Don't get me wrong, I love Sonar, that's why I came back after 5 years, but this hurt. Oh well I have my settings saved now. Backup every 5 Minutes or 5 changes. I hope this thread saves someone else before they get burned.

Yeah... autosave can get a little hiccuppy and I'm OCD enough to stay on top of saving (especially after getting REALLY burned by crashes during the X2 days).
 
Although I use the regular Save function I actually think I use Save As almost as frequently. My project folders are jam packed with versions of every incremental step of the project. Like I'll set up the project for my "learning/writing" phase and label it "Start". Then I'll immediately Save As again with "Start Scratch". This way if my test takes aren't working out or I have the parts figured out well enough to not need whatever tests I did I can return to the blank version. Then I'll do something like "Start Tracking Rhythm Finals" and record all the parts that will  be in the final release. As I do this I'll occasionally do a Save As with a numbering scheme "Tracking Rhythm Finals 1" or "2" and so on. If I set up for a new part or task I'll change the title to "Tracking Lead Scratch Start" or "Edit Drums Start" and again as I work number those as I progress.
 
May seem excessive and perhaps it is but it serves two purposes for me.
 
1) is to avoid corruption. hings aren't nearly as bad as they used to be but I do still experience what I think is a higher project corruption rate than others. Not sure why that is... either my system and/or I'm just really agressive sometimes (like I do something extremely heavy duty without thinking and boom... corruption). It only happens maybe once or twice per project (at most) but when it does I have to scrap it. Usually there is a crash or the project starts getting glitchy then it'll just get worse and worse until it's unuseable. So if I notice something is going glitchy I revert to the last working version and lose very little work (if any at all).
 
2) I find that just using Save then experiencing a crash sometimes doesn't mean I can get that project working again. I've been burned by this a lot in the past (in X2) which is why I adopted this method. Basically after the crash I might be able to get the project open again but it'll start acting all weird and eventually corrupt completely. Opening a Save As instead totally avoids that. Not sure why opening a Save project after a crash does this but I'm guessing since it's the same exact project stored in the same place that something bogus happens to the file (sometimes). With a Save As version it's completely separate from the crash.
 
3) It makes it a lot easier to keep the project clean and go back to earlier versions whenever I want for whatever reason. Since I do sooooo many takes and tests as I write and track and try out lots of wacky production tricks that can cause damage this is a good option to have. For example... all those Scratch takes I do and even my final tracks turn into a MOUNTAIN of crud which weighs the project down. So once I get something tracked and comped how I like I can simply export or copy ONLY the takes/comps I want and import them into the much cleaner "Start" version of the project. Like I might end up with a dozen versions of the project just from rhythm guitars. I take the finals from the last version and import them into the 1st emptier version. Even with Archive and all the other stuff we can do to keep resource consumption low I think projects can still start getting wacky just because they've been manipulate more often. So it's like all that work and saving never happened and the project is newer and more stable. It's also less crap to look at/wade through and keeps me from getting distracted with dumb stuff like "hmm... maybe I'll try THIS take instead" or whatever. If I made the decision something is the "Final" part then I did it for a reason. Any time I go farting around I almost ALWAYS end up going with my original choice so why waste time and tempt those distractions. I can also send that project to someone and it'll be a lot less huge and crazy for the receiver (if you guys saw some of my projects you'd be "WTF Beeps?!!" lol...
 
We've got that new Save Copy As that looks interesting and I know it could probably end up being a better option for my little system but I haven't quite wrapped my head around the full implications of it yet so it remains outside my process for now. I guess really it just means I could work in one project for as long as I want or it remains stable and just poop out my versions as I go without thinking about them until I need them. In fact maybe I'll try it out on my next big adventure.
 
tl;dr
 
Beeps is a spazz who uses Save As.

You guys are not alone..........

Wow, Lots of great ideas Guys! Thanks for all the input. Cntl-S is my new bestest friend!
 
 

I don't know about you guys, but it seems like the more I use CTRL-S, the more stable Sonar is.

I would most definitely not want Auto Save as default. There are far too many "helpful" features that are default (and more creeping in all the time) that I have to disable/keep track of as it is.
 

BobF
I don't know about you guys, but it seems like the more I use CTRL-S, the more stable Sonar is.

Possible. Maybe just the act of saving gives Sonar a chance to do some background housecleaning as it writes to disk whereas not saving for long stretches allows all the little 1s and 0s to get freaky deaky.
 
As you can tell I am a highly trained computer talkin' dood so I totes know whut I'm talkin' about.

BobF
I don't know about you guys, but it seems like the more I use CTRL-S, the more stable Sonar is.

This has been brought up before.  (Someone theorized that saving did some sort of clear or reset on a cache/buffer somewhere).  A few users seemed to agree, so there might be something to it.

If you don't like autosave by default, you can just disable it and it won't come back until you reinstall the software. I was thinking more about people who are interested in Sonar and download the demo. Maybe they find the program very easy to use and start recording some tracks which they think are going to make a good song. Then they do something stupid or they didn't set up preferences correctly and the program suddenly crashes. They start complaining in some other forum that Sonar is very unstable and doesn't even autosave the project...

I used to used auto-save, but did not care for not knowing when it would do its thing, and that was fairly annoying, so I developed a habit of doing a Save As to create a backup of the whole project folder, right before a session where I knew there were going to be major changes.  I would also do CTRL+S to save the current version of the project right before any significant edits/changes, and again after being happy with the results of those edits/changes.
 
As a result of adopting the above, I have never lost any significant amount of work for any project.
 
Bob Bone
 
(edited to fix spelling goofs)
 

Anderton
I don't think the demo can save or export

 
Hmm.....that itself isn't user-friendly IMHO. I enjoyed working on a test project for a few weeks when I tried the DP8 demo. If it didn't allow project saving, I would definitely have stopped using it on the first day and gone elsewhere. Hope Sonar demo users will stick with the software for several days at least.
 
 

robert_e_bone
I would also do CTRL+S to save the current version of the project right before any significant edits/changes, and again after being happy with the results of those edits/changes.
 
As a result of adopting the above, I have never lost any significant amount of work for any project. 

 
This strategy didn't work for me. On a couple of occasions I was too focused on editing and COMPLETELY forgot to hit Ctrl+S, then the program crashed and I lost a significant amount of work (in SPlat). So, I had Auto Save enabled again, but it's a little annoying so I set it to work only every 25 minutes. A heavy project I'm currently working on takes about 1 minute to save, so it's still annoying anyway and I had to post this FR.
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Periodic-Saved-toast-notification-m3245182.aspx#3245182

 

Kev999
By the time the 30-day trial period was nearly up I had projects in development that I wanted to continue working on, so I went on to purchase the full product. If I had not been able to save projects with that trial version, then I probably would have moved on and ended up using some different software instead.

 
Yep, exactly what I mean. If I were CW I would conduct a survey in the near future with respondents who didn't purchase Sonar 2015 after giving it a try and ask why they didn't purchase it.

rogeriodec
The best balance I found was autosave every 10 minutes, 

 
Well, this best balance will probably change in the near future as the file size of your project increases. My heavy projects take about 1 minute to save and a 1 min-long save every 10 minutes would definitely kill me...

rogeriodec

icontakt
 
Well, this best balance will probably change in the near future as the file size of your project increases. My heavy projects take about 1 minute to save and a 1 min-long save every 10 minutes would definitely kill me...

What's the final size of your .CWP files?

 
The CWP file I'm currently working in is only 4.43MB, but the project's Audio folder is currently 1.60GB (this is after I removed unused files). I know, I have way too many Take lanes clips in the project... 

rogeriodec

icontakt
The CWP file I'm currently working in is only 4.43MB, but the project's Audio folder is currently 1.60GB (this is after I removed unused files). I know, I have way too many Take lanes clips in the project... 

Well, my solution to speed up read and write, was put two SSD in RAID-0, where one reaches almost 10x the speed of an HDD.

 
Yep, your kind donation to me will be highly appreciated.