Hi all

Had an issue today whereby I'd been working on an intricate drawing all afternoon, pressing save every few minutes (either via File-Save or Ctrl+S), thinking it was saving my file as this is what I've always done.

I got into a bit of a muddle this evening, fill colouring something to try and get it a solid shape etc messed stuff up so I thought...I'll just close without saving as I've been saving all afternoon so it'll just reload to before this fill colour thing.

I reopened my file and found that it had reverted to my drawing from very early on this afternoon (it's about 10pm now) and nothing had been saved. In fact pressing save even then made no difference, only Save as would work. But then the file created by Save As also would not save when I made any further changes. I've now uninstalled Inkscape, reinstalled, and whilst the Save now seems to be working, the "saved date" time does not update in Windows explorer. Also I'm nervous that this will happen again and I'll lose another 8 hours of my life to this software.

What am I doing wrong? What should I do to prevent this in future?

I'm using the most recent version of Inkscape on Windows 10 64 bit.

Thanks

First thing I recommend is to activate "Autosave" at Preferences - it´s just a relief having the files updated say every 10 min for example. On macOS it´s the most unstable app I´ve ever experienced.

Thanks, I did have that on so thank goodness I have managed to recover some of it, but had to go digging through temporary files to find it and it's not got everything on there.

I just don't understand why such a basic function as "save" could be so problematic. I now don't trust it to save whether I press save or whether it is autosaving!

Is "Inkscape SVG" the last option you´re trying to save or are other chosen file formats in the meantime?

I'm literally just pressing Crtl+S or File-Save so I'd imagine it should just be whatever it saves it at first time, which I think is Inkscape SVG? I try to keep the habit of pressing ctrl+s every few minutes as I'm used to having to do that for spreadsheets at work!

Thanks for the help, appreciate you taking the time :)

Reading your post brought on a cold sweat.  We all know the shock when your work evaporates and the rising panic as you frantically search for some recoverable remnants.  I've crashed the program, I've discarded valuable files, I've over-written some inspired illustrations, but as far as I know Inkscape never refused to save for me.  Still, you have my sympathy.

This won't recover any lost work but might help to preserve your future work.  When a drawing has unsaved changes, Inkscape adds an asterisk to the file name in the title bar.  It appears when you make changes in your drawing and disappears when you save successfully.

I've had problems with some Autodesk applications capturing keystrokes even when they're minimised, interfering with the foreground application.

Lastly, is it possible that your files are securely saved in some obscure folder with a dodgy file extension?  A disk search for all recently modified files might be fruitful.

Thank you. 

I know of the asterisk thing, that was disappearing when I pressed save but alas nothing was saving at all.

I'm only saving in a folder within My Documents, the recovered file was in a temp folder that I found listed in the auto save settings, but it was the one in my documents that was failing to save.

I have uninstalled and reinstalled the software and it seems to still be working now but as I no longer trust it I'm going to have to keep doing Save As to make absolutely sure, then just delete the extra files that creates