Keeping Temp files longer or autosave feature

[Gale Andrews]

There would be a prescribed size limit

Which would be what? 1 TB? More? Less?
Does this feature create an accumulation of unsaved projects, or does it only apply to the last project open? If only the last project, then how does Audacity keep a record of the last but one project so that it can be deleted? If it creates an accumulation of unsaved projects, where is the button that allows the user to clean up the mess?

The second idea as I can most sensibly envisage it only saves and retains projects that are open when Audacity is quit. This might be one project, or several projects. It's nothing to do with the last project, because if you File > Close on the last project and agree not to save, it's deleted. If you keep adding new projects without closing old ones then quit, you will find more and more project windows opening on each launch of Audacity, so this is the discipline on deciding what you do with that unsaved data. I found this a good feature in whatever program I found it in.

Didn't Koz want something like this second feature? I thought he did.

With the first idea, like any size limit, the user decides. They could be shown the current space available on the temp directory or on all connected volumes. The people who have suggested this feature have not asked for a button to remove unwanted projects, but a project manager that can safely delete (saved projects) is something that has been asked for anyway. It could be extended to sets of unsaved changes that are envisaged here.


Gale

[steve]

Preference "Always store unsaved changes on quit". This would remove the "Save Changes?" dialogue and store something like an autosave file and the _data it points to. There would be a prescribed size limit and if that limit would be exceeded, the "Save Changes" dialogue appears.
......
With the first idea, like any size limit, the user decides. They could be shown the current space available on the temp directory or on all connected volumes. The people who have suggested this feature have not asked for a button to remove unwanted projects, but a project manager that can safely delete (saved projects) is something that has been asked for anyway. It could be extended to sets of unsaved changes that are envisaged here.

For the record, if we allowed negative votes I'd vote -1 for this.

In order to try and make it workable it is rapidly becoming a lot more complex - it's no longer just a "quit" option but now involves file and disk space management. I strongly suspect that the reason that a "clear up temporary data" option has not been requested as part of the feature is because the feature has not been fully thought through. In the case of recording 1 or 2 hour church services, this will add gigabytes of "junk" temporary files after every recording unless the user actively selects to remove this data. I call it "junk" because in most cases when the user does not want to Save the project, these temp file are unwanted and unnecessary.

I think this option would lead to complaints "why does Audacity 2.x use so much disk space?" It seems to me to be perfectly clear as it is now - do you want to Save the project or not? If not, then clear up the temp files.

If we decide to abandon any regard for the amount of disk space used, I would much prefer to use disk space for saving the Undo History in a Saved project rather than saving projects that the user has elected to not save.

The second idea as I can most sensibly envisage it only saves and retains projects that are open when Audacity is quit. This might be one project, or several projects. It's nothing to do with the last project, because if you File > Close on the last project and agree not to save, it's deleted. If you keep adding new projects without closing old ones then quit, you will find more and more project windows opening on each launch of Audacity,

So in effect, that is the same as providing a "Crash" button.
This seems like a better option than the first option, but personally I still don't like it and I don't imagine any developer enthusiasm for it.

I found this a good feature in whatever program I found it in.

I vaguely recollect a similar feature - perhaps it was in some version of Cool Edit? I thought it was a bug.

[waxcylinder]

For the record, if we allowed negative votes I'd vote -1 for this.

And that would be a -1 for the record from me too.

I have no desire to overfill user's discs for them.

[RANT] IMVHO if folk are going to use computers they do really need to get to grips with the basics of housekeeping, file management, backups etc. etc [/RANT]

If we decide to abandon any regard for the amount of disk space used, I would much prefer to use disk space for saving the Undo History in a Saved project rather than saving projects that the user has elected to not save.
a bug.

I would happily vote +1 for this - but I would want it be a selectable option (with default = "off")

Peter

[Gale Andrews]

I can't see any of the currently active developers being interested in either feature, but developers may change and disk space on drives keeps increasing. Audacity would have to set some space limit for the first feature. It certainly deserves to have a "devcomment" alongside cautioning against the disk space usage if the feature was "on" by default (or cautioning against trying to explain it on first "Save changes?" appearance if user was given a choice then).

@Peter, do you mean you want to store just a list of commands used in the projects? Or actually store the data (so that in the fifth time you have the project open, you can go back to the state the project was in after the first edit in the first session)?



Gale

[Robert J. H.]

It would be certainly worthwhile to save the last undo actions beyond sessions.
It could be limited to a percentage of the project data increase or to a fixed megabyte amount, both adjustable in preferences.

Regarding the auto save:
It would be nice when the projects that were discarded were at least temprary preserved by moving them to the recycled folder or that they existed for a certain amount of days (like temporary internet files).
However, I don't see that this can be done, firstly because different operating systems are involved and secondly because Audacity isn't running in the background, thus the time stamp can't be detected and the data would still remain on disk for months, if Audacity isn't executed in this period.

[waxcylinder]

@Peter, do you mean you want to store just a list of commands used in the projects? Or actually store the data (so that in the fifth time you have the project open, you can go back to the state the project was in after the first edit in the first session)?

Me personally, I don't - when I close or save a project it's in a state I know I want it to be.

My vote for this is me wearing my "corporate" hat on behalf of other users that have posted with such requests - and thus yes that would include the data storage too.

But really I can't for the life of me see why anybody should really want such a feature if they are exercising good file and project management, making safett/archive copies throughout their project at critical stages.

Peter.

[Gale Andrews]

@Peter, do you mean you want to store just a list of commands used in the projects? Or actually store the data (so that in the fifth time you have the project open, you can go back to the state the project was in after the first edit in the first session)?

My vote for this is me wearing my "corporate" hat on behalf of other users that have posted with such requests - and thus yes that would include the data storage too.

"Including the undo data in the project save" only has four votes right now. Robert seems to be voting for it now. How many votes would be representative of the others that missed getting on to Wiki?

It would be nice when the projects that were discarded were at least temprary preserved by moving them to the recycled folder or that they existed for a certain amount of days (like temporary internet files).
However, I don't see that this can be done, firstly because different operating systems are involved and secondly because Audacity isn't running in the background, thus the time stamp can't be detected and the data would still remain on disk for months, if Audacity isn't executed in this period.

I agree time-based deletion is problematic hence I did not propose it. It works if the user has a clean-up program that detects age of temporary files, but many such programs also clean the Recycle Bin when they run. Hence I think these two ideas pose a greater risk that the feature won't provide enough backup security. Also Audacity could not access the Recycle Bin and default search may not look there.


Gale

[Robert J. H.]

I give my vote to a "undo over sessions" feature, although it is not on the top of my wishlist.
It may be helpful for beginners.
Another auto-save aspect that I really miss at the moment:
When I test code in the Nyquist prompt, it is lost after a crash.
If those few KBs code were saved temporarily, one wouldn't be forced to copy the text each time to the clipboard (or an editor) in order to be able to recover it in case of failure.

[steve]

When I test code in the Nyquist prompt, it is lost after a crash.

+1, it can be really annoying when that happens.

Unfortunately there is no easy fix that I can see because Nyquist settings are not currently saved. Saving settings for Nyquist plug-ins is not entirely straightforward because plug-ins can easily be added / removed / edited by users, which could leave redundant (or even corrupting) data in the preference file, so there would probably need to be some sanity checking when reading the data back in. The good news is, that if/when saving Nyquist plug-in settings is implemented, any code written to the Nyquist Prompt should be saved automatically before the code is run. I think that it would probably be better if Nyquist plug-in preferences were saved separately from either the project auto-save or the audacity.cfg file.

[Edgar]

"Including the undo data in the project save" only has four votes right now. Robert seems to be voting for it now. How many votes would be representative of the others that missed getting on to Wiki?

Conceptually I am +1 but realistically I think there are too many pitfalls to implement this.