Suggestion for future PDN updates - Crash Recovery

[Shad Hedge]

ok, i'll admit I don't post here much, mostly i just sit back and browse or read without commenting. But right now I've got this idea in my brain and i'm sharing it.

Just now, I was working on a picture on paint.net, I've been working on it for nearly TWO HOURS, when all of the sudden my computer overheats and dies on me. I start it back up, pull up firefox again and restore all my tabs, open up my YIM once more, then I go back and open paint.net and ALL MY WORK IS GONE!

after venting my rage by punching inanimate objects around the house, i realised something. Overheating might not be the only reason why a computer will suddenly shut off. If it's a desktop, the power can go out. If it's a laptop, the battery can die. Both kinds can overheat, and computers can also just crash for other reasons too. Or sometimes art programs themselves crash for some random reason. this isn't the first time i've lost hours of work. Yes I do save, but sometimes I'll be so intent on a project I forget about everything else except just doing it.

One time my girlfriend had the computer crash when she was finishing a college paper that was due in a few hours, and she'd forgotten to save. When she got the computer back on, the word processor went into "recovery mode" and restored everything she'd typed before the crash. So this is my suggestion: If other programs can have a "recovery mode" for when they shut down unexpectedly, why can't the next major Paint.Net update have something like that as well? I wouldn't care if it didn't restore all the steps you'd done, I'd be happy if it restored all layers as they were when the crash occurred. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who's had this problem or the only one who could benefit from it.

[Lance McKnight]

This is similar to a request somebody made regarding an Auto Save feature, and I believe Rick's answer was no.

To be honest, the only way to avoid losing your work is to do three things: save, save, and save often! Just make sure to save the project with a PDN extension, it will save all of your layers intact, unless you are one of those unfortunate to have it corrupt your file as it has happened to some folks here.

[Sarkut]

Save reminder freeware.

http://www.spacejock.com/yTimer_Screens.html

[david.atwell]

It's been suggested many many times, and the answer is always no. As you might imagine, that would be a very complicated feature to program, and it would result in a slower program, more of a memory hog. As BoltBait famously said, "Rick could never write enough code to save you from yourself." Save early, save often. Just make it a habit. :-)

[jerry533482]

What if, rather than saving all at once at a specific time interval, each step was saved to disk while it was rendering? Wouldn't that even out resource hogging and such? Think about it, saving an entire image is complex (hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pixels for multiple layers) and time consuming, but wouldn't saving a single step at a time hinder performance far less? Sort of a save-as-you-go approach.

[Rick Brewster]

This is something I'm planning to address in 4.0.

The biggest problem in 3.x is that, even if you are diligent about saving often, a stray error during the saving process can nuke the file and wipe out what you've been working on anyway. At the minimum, a simple and conventional approach of first saving your "A.pdn" to "A.saving.pdn" (or whatever) and then swapping the filenames after success is needed (and not difficult to implement, honestly). Past that, hooking into the Win7/Vista "restart manager" is also something I'm looking at, but it's lower priority.

[jerry533482]

One question: will this demand more resources?