autosave issue - doesn't seem to work

Having suffered many losses due to crashing, I thought that setting auto save would let me at least have a decent ly recent version after a chrash.
 
Although I see the project being saved very frequently, when  after a crash I open the project again, nothing from the previous session is ever there.
 
Of course when things are going best is when you forget to protect yourself and save, but what about autosave, isn't it  in place to counteract the negative impact of crash's
 
So darn frustrating

THanks, I did not know that.However what was strange was there was no Auto-save-Copy of" the  session I was hoping to recover. However when I looked in the audio folder for the project I found the files I wanted to restore
 
I see all the audio track back ups and realize this is a spot I'll need to do some clean up. I have worked on this tune a while and 5 gigs 
 
 
Thanks again