I've set my preferences to backup every 2 minutes or 5 changes... up to 8 copies (I know, too many)
but I just had repeated crashes trying to bring up a song I was working on till late last night (with no crashes) and found only one backup being stored...
 
neither avoided the crash as soon as I pressed play...couldn't go back to an earlier backup so I ended up resaving under a new name before playing/crashing and the resaved song  no longer crashed.
 
main point... I made oooodles of changes, working for about 3-4 hours and only the most recent backup, essentially the same as the main song, were listed... thus not able to go back to an earlier version...
 
any thoughts?

I have had the autosave, save me a few times from crashes - it seems to work fine here, but I have it set to every 20 minutes, so I do tend to loose some work if I have to use it.
 
I save multiple versions of projects as I go, the autosave is just icing on the cake.

I too save multiple versions which is good but ya know... ended up trying the prior version but it was before I'd added bass via lots of comps and some effect changes... figured the autosave would catch all the inbetween stuff, up to 16 minutes worth ... but not so. 
 
Just checked other song ideas and multiple autosaves are also not present.  at most just one...

I've emailed cake in response to the crash report acknowlegement I just received... I hope an email reply gets logged with the crash report...would make sense.
 
 
 

If you have "Enable versioning of project (CWP) files" checked, the versions do not end with the ".cwp" extension so the versions are not visible in the SONAR Open dialog. Try Revert instead of Open.

So, auto save is separate?  I see the one autosave... in the old days 8.5 or so I remember many autosaves... ok I'll go check... thanks scook.  I thought the two dialogues were the same... ie, how often and how many...
 

OK... now I got it... Thanks! So I guess the versions don't use the criteria for autosave...or maybe it does, I was just not doing anything during the longer times versions were logged...
 
BTW, do you know why just because I renamed the song it stopped the crash?  Just curious.
 

Autosave and versioning are in the same dialog. Autosave saves the project based on time or change count. Versioning retains a specified number of project saves.

gotcha...I guess it's to keep the folders clean... makes sense.  Thanks again.  Funny I was able to stop the crash just by changing the name... twilight zone at times...but now I know where my backups are!

You can have up to 999 versions of a project. There is not enough info to determine what caused or stopped the project from crashing. I don't spend a lot of time doing post-mortems when I finally get a project going again.