I was wondering if the incremental backups into the “$HIP/backup” folder work flawless.

I just had a complete system meltdown while doing some basic Vellum simulation, which is another issue, and after a reboot I find that there are 15 backups from the scene I was working on, but the last one was from yesterday. I see that there's over 40 backups from other scenes, so 15 is not the maximum I suspect.

Unfortunately I worked on it for a few hours and finally had some neat cloth settings , but had not saved it manually for a while :-(

Is that a bug ?

R.

By default your scene file is moved to backup when you save over the scene file, so the more often you save the more frequent backups, so essentially backup folders contains your previous saves

If you have auto save for your session on, it will autosave every n minutes, which can combine with numbered backup or be incremental

But chances are you didn't have it on so you simply just have your previous saves in the backup folder

Ah, I see. I thought the files in the backup folder were autosaves, or auto backups.

Good to know.

Thanks,

R.

Autosave every n minutes works verry inconsistently.

On anny operating system i have tried.

I’d say try to get a habit of saving often. Whenever you move one step forward just save manually a new version or press ctrl+s. When you get in trouble open the last best version.

Edit: files can easily be deleted, but work not always recreated

Autosave must be activated. However, if it does not work it is probably easy to make a Python loop that does it.

Edit2: After checking this a bit, there are at least two requisites for Auto Save to work.

1. Enable it after restarting Houdini
2. The first file (untitled.hip) must be saved once. (i.e. my test show that Auto Save did not start until this - Houdini 19.5.403 will prompt you to save your file if Auto Save is on and you have not done that. It will open the "Save as" window.)

The following environment variable maybe should be set. It will use it after I saved the hip file once.

# Houdini backup dir (set to whatever you prefer)
export HOUDINI_BACKUP_DIR="/dev/shm/"

Additionally, it seems to me that the "time" only measures active time, meaning you are doing changes to your Houdini session.

Please inform us if you notice anything contrary to what I wrote here, or would like to provide any supplemental info.

ah, i had searched for the autosave toggle but had assumed it was in the save load options so I could not find it. (might be a good idea to add a toggle in the save load options. Good to know about the active time save.



in python the ccommand is


HSCIPT

How to enable autosave automatically for each session, i.e Without "remembering" it? (ZBrush do it and I like it)

Note: "/dev/shm/" is shadowmemory (i.e. RAM) on Linux. It will be emptied at restart (like /tmp/).