Thanks mudgel. Ive seen you here plenty enough to know you have folks best interest at heart. I do save off to another drive when I save. I started doing the auto save today. I set it for 10 moves. Constantly slowing me down waiting. Still makes me jump when Im adjusting a plug or something, and it goes to work. Set it for 30, much preferred. 2 questions - does changing views or focus to a different track or say, PRV view count as a move? Kinda seems like it. Also, does auto save follow the same setup for save being used or is it only capable of doing it in a set way? Thanks!

Hmm, yeah. That's the drawback. It can be slow for certain kinds of projects.
 
Cutting a long story short, what makes project files big - and therefore slow to save - is data density.
 
So one thing is heavy editing of clips, creating lots of small clips. Another is MIDI data intensive projects, meaning lots of note date.
 
I'm always doing lots of different kinds of work, and I've really started to notice the distinction. When I'm doing mixing of projects that have come to me all as WAV files, the auto-save is unnoticable. At the other extreme, when I'm working on editing audiobooks in 1-2 hour chunks, even with a single mono track, once you're at the level of editing breaths out, you're generating thousands upon thousands of clips, and the project files start to get big and slow to save. Projects with lots of midi data sit somewhere in the middle.
 
It would be nice if the save process could become more optimal. I suspect this is a hard computer science problem rather than anything Sonar or Windows-specific though.

As to your question, I've never quite understood how the "amount of moves" thing works. It certainly never works how I think it will :)
 

I've never lost anything to Sonar and normally I don't turn on auto save unless I'm working with a client or live band. Then it's easy to be busy and forget to save. On my own I'm like the rest and save after every worthwhile change has been made..End of day before I shut down I back up to a second drive. Hard drives are so cheap compaired to other gear. I still have every hard drive I ever owned minus a few that died. 
I even have a box of floppy disks!!! 

jshep0102
I certainly appreciate the ideas, and to an extent the lashing. The thing is, I NEVER remember to do that. When I work, my focus has always been so high on it that it never crosses my mind. I'm the same way at my other job. I have to do paperwork on my own time because the job is all my brain can see. The thing about it is, I've worked 6 hours without an issue. If this thing was consistently screwing my work to death, I'd probably be 100% on it. But, it lulls you into the false sense of security.  
 
After all these years of these products being marketed, imo one should be able to work at will. I was working fast and furious on a emergency basis for a cd submittal, so I kinda needed PC fear to not be an issue. But it's always an issue.  
 
Thanks for a good explanation, John T. I'm going in right now to set up auto-save. I had it on years ago, but it scared the crap out of me every time it does it, watching the screen do something I didn't do. Gonna have to get used to it, but will be worth it I guess. While doing that, it would make sense to follow Craig's latest backup tip of the week at the same time, as this will surely take more drive space than before. Thanks for chiming in gents. Peace

Wow sorry about your loss! Very familiar story.
 
I have been re-installing everything on a new DAW. I use Sonar X3 Pro. Re-installed from scratch at least 30 programs including plugs and other utilities. I have about a week into this project so far and little things still keep cropping up.
 
Thanks to this thread I went and checked the settings for auto-save.  The default is to not have it turned on!!!
 
Needless to say I turned it on.
 
I think Cake should re-consider and make the default to auto save.
 
Thanks for the alert.
 
 

Most of us have learned through painful scar tissue, to make SURE that we back up quite frequently.
 
I too am in the camp of manual saving, and like bitflipper, I do it both before and after any significant edit or operation in a project, as well as for any AHA moments.
 
I also make sure that any project where I have done a single edit in the current session, and it is open - and I step away, even just to run out for lunch, that I close the session and save the project folder to an external backup drive, so that if the hard drive should fail while I am at lunch, I still have the work saved off to somewhere I can recover it from.
 
I spent over 20 years in mainframe technical support, and we learned VERY early into it all to always make sure you have backups, both local and offsite, of any data that is critical, PERIOD.  We actually had a case where we had a major power failure that also took out the backup power systems, and the instant heat melted down some of the mainframe's solder, and needless to say it took lots of stuff with it.  Well, turns out a set of the backup tapes were physically damaged too, so we turned to our offsite backups and were able to piece things together from a week prior, and then apply all logged transactions in a forward recovery operation to get all but the data that was literally in-flight at the moment the power had gotten cut.  That data would have been lost forever, were it not for redundant backups.
 
Save, Save, Save, Save, Save, Save, Save.  It IS a mindset.
 
Bob Bone

I have "save" and "save as" as two of the nine buttons in the Custom Module in the Control Bar.
Easy as pie to click on at any time.
 
Grum.