On occasion, when my computer crashes, the last save of the document does not have my most recent changes or edits. I’m only aware of this manifesting after a computer lock-up (not necessarily related to Scrivener). Whenever I elect to finish a session, I quit, forcing a save and so no problem. I do manually save (command-s), but clearly not regularly enough.
This would suggest that I’m working for long periods without a pause, my computer goes belly up and I lose my work.
The preferences have an option to auto-save “after ‘x’ seconds" of inactivity, I dialed this up to every 60 seconds, as the default of every 2 seconds had my computer juddering under the strain.
Perhaps a preference to (force) autosave “every ‘x’ seconds” in combination with the above would fix this, if indeed I have a handle on the issue.
That probably wouldn’t work out too well, for the same reason you increased the idle timer to begin with (and for the same reason it deliberately designed to work around pauses in activity rather than a blind cycle). If you try to type while it is saving, you’ll get a pause of some length, so a periodic save interval would merely impose this on anyone that uses it, now and then, despite their current activity in the project. My suggestion is to try and find a rate that doesn’t interfere with your working pattern, that isn’t so high it rarely if ever happens. Waiting a whole minute before saving is quite long, I’d start low, like maybe five seconds, and gradually increase it in steps for two seconds until it is no longer in the way. Then you’ll have maximum protection without everything suddenly halting mid-thought.
Photoshop puts an asterisk in the header bar to show the document is edited but not saved. Perhaps something along those lines would allow us to keep an eye on the current save state of our project.
On a Mac it is standard to signify this information with a black dot within the “Close” button on the title bar, the one that is bright red if you use the aqua theme.
