Sorry, no. Freeway’s auto-backup is a great feature, but it’s not what
you’re needing right now. Here’s how it works (and this does catch
everyone out at least twice – it’s not what you would expect).
- Create a Freeway document, work on it a little, save it.
- Close the document.
- Open the document again.
-
If the document could be opened without errors, Freeway makes
a .fwbackup file with a copy of the state of the document at the point
that you opened it.
- Make more changes, save.
-
You now have two documents – a .freeway and a .fwbackup – that
represent the current state of the project, and the last time you put
it away, respectively.
This can be incredibly helpful, or not, depending on what you were
expecting.
You’re not alone in wanting an incremental auto-save that can save the
history of a document as you work, and allow you to recover gracefully
when things go sideways.
This has been discussed a lot in previous development cycles, and the
reason why it has not been added has always been the size of the
document file. In addition to the disk storage requirement, having to
take the time to save a multi-hundred megabyte document every five
minutes or so would be incredibly interruptive.
The real underlying issue is the document format itself. It’s a binary
file, containing every page and all its geometry, every link, every
resource local and remote, a proxy (low-resolution copy) of every
image, the results of the last upload to a server, and countless other
things besides, all mashed together in one great file. When you open
this document, Freeway constructs an object model of your entire site,
and maintains any changes from the virgin starting point up to your
next save in memory. This model is constantly changing, and if you
want to save it, then it would take as long as a regular save, as
Freeway has to distill that model back down to the document file format.
So unless the document format changes significantly (and this is a
huge problem for backward-compatibility) then these sorts of “delta”
saves that other applications use to construct history palettes or
auto-recovery features would most likely be incredibly difficult or
expensive in terms of user experience.
An interesting aside – Adobe InDesign, in its very first iteration,
was incredibly buggy and crashed all the time. This prompted the
developers to create a very robust auto-save and crash recovery
system, one which I am still regularly astounded by in the very rare
cases that it crashes these days. Why they did not plow that
development effort into fixing the bugs in the first place is a
question I can’t answer, but the times that I’ve had something go
horribly wrong and my bacon was saved have made me thank them
repeatedly for the choice they did make.
Walter
On Dec 26, 2008, at 11:23 AM, SkipII wrote:
I jsut lost several hours of work, not paying attention to the last
time I saved.
Doesn’t Frewway Pro 5 have some form of automatic saves? I see
something under preferences but it is only a check-box and does not
allow you to specify when you want things saved.
Thanks for all the help[ on this board. I am using the test version
and finding very little in the sparse documentation and the
tutorials. The knowledge base is pretty detailed and unsorted, so
I’m having trouble finding the basics.
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