Why you should deactivate "live save" in your preferences

It shouldn't be activated by default.

This is just my opinion, and suggestion, - I totally understand why people like and use this feature. I don't, and here's why.

NOTE : This is just my opinion, if you use it, great for you, this is not an attack on people using the feature

Until everything else is fixed with the UNDO/REDO problems/bugs, this feature shouldn't be activated by default.

Just giving another perspective... and yeah, I'm frustrated with this because, I forgot, again, that the text+ doesn't behave the same as text+ in fusion - Unfortunately, I'm so used to not have this UNDO problem with 99.9% of all the other softwares, so I constantly forget about it when I use Resolve. I love resolve, but man, I can't stand this bug anymore.

It's gonna happen at one point, to anyone. You will edit your Text+ (or whatever the other things are affected by this bug), you'll forget that your ctrl+z won't work, you'll undo something else, it will switch to another window.. bla bla bla. You'll close the project or the software to restore what you messed up, but you'll get what was saved automatically.

Having options is great, in a perfect world, perfect softwares, "live save" activated, why not. But since I'm a kid, the first thing you hear is : Save your projects, save your files... the one rule which is taught across the board.

How many times Resolve froze on you, scared it's gonna crash. Because you moved something, or switched to another page, etc? Then in crashes (or not), but what happens if you have the auto-save activated and it crashes during a live save? Can the project be corrupted?

I think that having control of your saving points is more important than this false sense of "security". And you don't gain any time out of it. You let a software decide one of the most important part of your work, what and when something is saved.

That's why you should consider deactivating this feature.

Of course, if you are the opposite of me, and you can work on projects for hours without saving anything, you constantly lose hours of work every time, "live save" can help you lol. But in this case, there is a deeper problem.

I agree (and disable live save), although my son does not - he grew up in a "google cloud docs / never click save" world (and, perhaps, a world more understanding of early & incremental software release). There are overlapping worlds of adults at this point to balance.

+1 for completion of WYSIWYG undo.

It's gonna happen at one point, to anyone.

Since version 12, it hasn't happened to me.

And while crashes for me are rare, they do happen. So I think the benefits of Live Save far outweigh the Operator Error mentioned here.

I think it's better to have it on my default.

Live Save also makes the "Revert to Last Saved Version" feature useless as every action you take is the last save. I hope they change that.

Not a fan either. The very first thing I did was turn it off. I use ctl-s frequently, but also like to have the ability to head off on a tangent and then decide not to save without having to undo.

I'd find an auto backup function more useful that saves the project state as a separate file in a backups folder at regular intervals, but leaves the original project file alone.

If you also turn on auto-save in addition to live-save, you can always revert to a version x minutes ago.

And again, undo in some places *can't* work like other apps. When a colorist makes continuous adjustments, using two hands, how do you expect it to work? Same thing for fairlight mixer adjustments. Fusion... well, I'll give you that.

I'd find an auto backup function more useful that saves the project state as a separate file in a backups folder at regular intervals, but leaves the original project file alone.

That function is already available but unlike Live Save it's not enabled by default.

Hi Roger, didn't know that, thanks for the tip!

@ Maxwell:

Until everything else is fixed with the UNDO/REDO problems/bugs, this feature shouldn't be activated by default.

this entire thread is base on this statment....

i don't see any issues with undo/redo in huge hours of daily use across mutiple machines with piles of films and tv shows graded i am unaware of a single issue with undo/redo, so i leave live save on 100% of the time, and it's never failed me

i also write DRT's every few hours as they are discreet from the database and take seconds to do, to my mind vastly safer then a ctl-s save the relies on a database to be valid, that leaves a pretty large gap in data security, if your drive with the database fails all live saves and manual saves and hourly saves, every thing saves are toast

a DRT sent to the cloud or a stable backup server has much more data safety

anyway, no issues with un/redo here, so no need to disable something to avoid something that is not an issue on my systems

I disagree. I think Live Save is a great feature.

Live save was the feature that convinced me to switch over from Premiere, and it has been one of my best digital friends since. All in all I lost hours of work in Premiere due to crashes and whatnot between autosaves. It was incredibly frustrating. I've lost maybe 5 minutes over the past few years with Resolve.

I haven't experienced a problem with the undo/redo thing myself, but I think the benefits of automatically having it enabled far outweigh the negatives for the vast majority of users.

I have live save enabled but when I have to open a version from earlier, I am not able to open the hourly archive saves, just the daily ones, even though I have it set to save every 10 minutes, every hour and every day for last 5 days. any insight?

I would love to see something like "keep N last saved version(s)" feature. Which would work in either Live or manual mode. Then the "revert to last version" option can become a menu/dialog to select which version. Sort of like the automatic versioned backup, but less intrusive (mine pops up a silly progress dialog which steals focus), and activated on every save instead of (or in addition to) a schedule. Perhaps they could be just differential saves, to keep time and space to a minimum. Really it's very close to the current archive feature, and the functionality could probably just be combined.

I can already set up incremental archive/backup in PG SQL however often I'd like (using PITR techniques), but that's the whole DB, not per project (or means using one DB per project). Also most DR users probably don't want to be DB admins.

Cheers,
-Max

Since version 12, it hasn't happened to me.

Man, Jim, you must live a charmed life! I keeps seeing your posts over and over where you seem to have none of the problems the rest of us have. What's your secret?

I would love to see something like "keep N last saved version(s)" feature. Which would work in either Live or manual mode. Then the "revert to last version" option can become a menu/dialog to select which version. Sort of like the automatic versioned backup, but less intrusive (mine pops up a silly progress dialog which steals focus), and activated on every save instead of (or in addition to) a schedule. Perhaps they could be just differential saves, to keep time and space to a minimum. Really it's very close to the current archive feature, and the functionality could probably just be combined.

I can already set up incremental archive/backup in PG SQL however often I'd like (using PITR techniques), but that's the whole DB, not per project (or means using one DB per project). Also most DR users probably don't want to be DB admins.

Cheers,
-Max

Is the current "keep x versions" not good enough for your needs?

Screen Shot 2021-05-25 at 1.33.49 pm.png (353.99 KiB) Viewed 3982 times

Is the current "keep x versions" not good enough for your needs?

Hi Peter,
I think I outlined the differences I was talking about. For example it would make "revert to last saved version" useful again with Live Save enabled. If anyone wants something more specific, just ask. Clearly I know about versioned backups feature, since I mentioned it a couple times. No need to tell me to RTFM, but thank you for the effort.

Cheers,
-Max

I don't agree. I see more positives than negatives. Live Save has saved me a few times when there was an OS crash (nothing to do with Resolve) and in other cases where, for whatever reason, I could no longer force a save. I think I just completed 16 feature films for the year, and haven't lost more than a minute of work with Resolve -- in general. I had one corrupted session under 16.2 where -- for some reason -- halfway through it stopped saving and gave no warning. There was other weirdness with that session, I was eventually able to recover from the problem, and I think it boiled down to me "overloading the timeline" with too many clips and too many nodes -- just a stressful session.

But in general, I think it can work. Other than Live Save, I do two other things that help:

1) when I'm randomly staring off into space or thinking about my next move in a session, I'll idly hit the Save button just because I can. It's cheap insurance and at least gives me assurance the session is good.

2) I make a manual backup at the end of every shift and add a date to the file name, so I'll have "Project_5-21-2021," "Project_5-22-2021," "Project_5-23-2021," "Project_5-24-2024" and so on in the Color folder of the project source file drive. If I ever had to revert or grab one timeline (or associated files), they'll be there. And that's backed up, too.

MS Word, Filemaker, Pro Tools, Premiere, and quite a few other kinds of software do similar things like Live Save, basically taking what's in RAM and writing it back out to the drive. At least in Resolve, you can turn it off if you want to.

Since version 12, it hasn't happened to me.

Man, Jim, you must live a charmed life! I keeps seeing your posts over and over where you seem to have none of the problems the rest of us have. What's your secret?

- I see that I am not the only one thinking what you are thinking

The different opinions are interesting to read. That was the purpose of this post, to have different perspectives on the subject.