crash results in lost files

[ZippyDan]

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. 

[Rick Brewster]

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.

[barbieq25]

When I was going to uni I made 3 copies of everything I did. One to the hard drive, one on a floppy & a rough printed copy. 

 

Backing up to elsewhere I used to do when we had our business. I've gotten slack. A timely reminder to do it for all our computers tonight

[sashwilko]

I save to a USB drive and to a secondary drive. Not just work from pdn, but college work and general notepad things. I like barbieq also print out some of my more important documentation. You can never back up and save enough

[midora]

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.

 

An improvement could be to rename the old file (maybe by appending the old date and time) before saving (controlled by an user option which tells how many old versions to keep).

[ZippyDan]

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?

[Rick Brewster]

An improvement could be to ... (controlled by a user option) ...

 

That's not really an improvement Adding options everywhere isn't what people want. Paint.NET is an image editor, not a backup service.

 

 

... auto-save as a nondefault option?

 

If it's a non-default option then no one will use it (statistically speaking).

 

 

with a warning about the performance lag?

 

People don't read, let alone remember, error dialogs. This wouldn't solve anything except it'd make people scared to use it.

 

A better option for you would be to use a utility which saves the screenshot to disk, and then automatically launches Paint.NET to open it. Window Clippings has this functionality built-in, for instance ("send to paint.net"). Paying $15 or whatever for that is significantly cheaper than 1) waiting for me to implement auto-save (which will, honestly, probably never happen), or 2) losing your data in a crash.

 

Remember, folks, Paint.NET is just 1 application ... it doesn't have to solve everything in your work flow. There is other software out there (it's true!) which can be used to fill in gaps.