Inkscape needs some reliable auto-save mechanism
Summary:
A perfect program used by the perfect user never has any issues, but for all other cases a reliable auto-save mechanism is needed.
Desired features:
Auto-save (auto-backup) should have these properties:
- Auto-save should happen automatically, preferably without affecting the user while saving
- Auto-save should not overwrite the original file, but save to a different file
- It should be rather easy for the user to revert to an automatically saved file
- After a crash (i.e.: whenever Inkscape starts and detects that an auto-save file exists) Inkscape should suggest to recover a file or document from the auto-save file(s)
The minimal variant would be that of GNU Emacs (no data loss in over 30 years of usage!): Use a different file name (based on the file being used) to save periodically. Also Emacs uses a mechanism that avoids loosing the final file when saving (e.g.: crash while saving) (Emacs would keep a "~ Backup" containing the last version, but Inkscape could remove that after the new file was saved successfully).
Other products (Like Grassvalley's video editor EDIUS) use many (up to 100) time-based backup files allowing to go back quite some time). You can configure number and interval of those. Creating such backups is very fast.
Some other products also create auto-save files, but they are slow and interrupt the user's work. This is not desired!
What happened?
Lost hours of work more than once when Inkscape just hung or crashed, or some software error messed up the work don so far.
What should have happened?
No or minimal loss of work being done.
Version info
Desired ASAP ;-)