[crash results in lost files]

Auto-save would be great, but with PDN's architecture you would have to wait for it every time it did an autosave. It can't operate in the background, in other words. And that could get pretty obnoxious on large files.

 

Paint.NET stores things in memory because that's how it's always done things. Remember, it started out as a college project in 2004 ... all these reliability things that software like Office has been getting people used to just didn't exist as an addressable concern back then (Vista introduced some stuff to make it easier in 2007). And even now they are a very expensive thing to implement. It will almost certainly never ever happen.

 

You can, however, rest assured that once an image is saved, it's good to go. It used to be that a crash during saving would both lose your new changes, and obliterate the original file. That was pretty bad, and has been fixed up good since v3.5.8 (May 2011).

 

The best advice I've got is just the same ol' mantra since the beginning of time: save early, save often.

 

in my situation, it wasn't really feasible to save as i would have missed the "next shot" (of course in retrospect, it would have been better to miss a shot than to lose everything ...)

 

i understand you want to keep your software snappy (or people won't want to use it), so how about implementing auto-save as a nondefault option? with a warning about the performance lag?

[crash results in lost files]

I have read several threads indicating that there is no hope of recovering unsaved files.

 

Is there any plan to address this?

 

My scenario: I was having a Skype conversation with an important overseas friend.  I was taking numerous screenshots and pasting them into Skype as the conversation progressed.  I did not really have time to save each file as I pasted.  During this process, my computer crashed and I lost dozens of irreplaceable photos (since it was real-time, those moments will never occur again).

 

Is there a good reason why paint.net ONLY stores images to working memory, and cannot also save to a temporary file?  An autosave feature seems like it would be a lifesaver for many people here.