Automatically save autorecovery-file before high-risk operations
In a way related to the idea at blender.community/c/rightclickselect/nLgbbc/ but a more general feature I'd love to see is an option in Blender preferences that will make Blender automatically save an autorecovery-copy of the blend file when triggering operations that are deemed high risk of "damage", hanging or crashing.
I don't know exactly how Blender and its mods work behind the scenes, but what I'm thinking is that modifiers and other features of Blender could notify Blender's core that it's about to perform a high-risk operation, and if the option is enabled in the preferences Blender will then automatically save a recovery-copy before the operation proceeds.
I've lost count of the times subdivision operations or cloth simulations have blown up in my face and Blender has either crashed or I've had to kill it because of freezing up, losing my work because I've forgotten to save first...
2 Comments
I wouldn't be against some nice safety nets, but I wonder how you could ever define what constitutes a "high risk operation".
You mention modifiers, but I can't think of one modifier that is a risk of freeze or crash just by itself. It's always a combination of several things that can lead to a crash: not having a beefy machine, or having too many resource-intensive softwares running at once, abusing modifiers, using high numbers, working on a too-heavy model, or too heavy scene, ... All these factors are relative and cumulative.
Perhaps that can be worked out with metrics? Perhaps in combination with the user being able to select among common features that cause hangups / freezes. A poll could also collect user experiences. As for modifier developers, they could choose themselves how to go about choosing for what / when (they) should make use of this feature, and / or let the user tick a box for it. E.g.: if some value set and RAM less than value or number of vertices about to be affected trigger feature.