Sketchup Blog - News and Notes from the Sketchup folks

Auto-save to the rescue

Posted by Aidan Chopra, Product Evangelist


Has SketchUp ever crashed on you? Is the sky blue?

The good news is that SketchUp has an Auto-save feature that automatically saves your model every five minutes by default. The bad news is that most people don't know about it. Let's rectify that, shall we?

You fiddle with SketchUp's Auto-save settings in the General panel of the Preferences dialog box. On Windows machines, this is located in the Window menu; on Macs, it's in the SketchUp menu. You can tell SketchUp how often you want to auto-save, and you can even turn off auto-saving altogether. If you're working on a really large model and the pause that occurs when SketchUp auto-saves is bothering you, you can always tell the software to save less often.

Keeping in mind that SketchUp only produces an auto-saved file when something awful happens, you can find it in the same folder as the original file—it's called Autosave_filename.skp. If you've never saved your model (shame on you), you can find an auto-saved SketchUp file in your My Documents folder. If you're on a Mac, the file is here:
~/Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 6/SketchUp/Autosave

Now get down off that window ledge and get back to work.

Model credits H!K for the axe; Jon for the laptop

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2 comments :

Anonymous said...

Skb Backup files and autosave files , this may be a bit confusing to the users... So here is a small reminder about what are .skb backup files (extract from Sketchup documentation) :

SketchUp creates a backup file every time you successfully save your SketchUp file. This file is an exact copy _of the previously saved version of the file_. The extension of the backup file is .skb.

* PC. The backup file is saved in the same folder as the saved file. By default, files are saved in your "My Documents" folder.
* Mac. The backup file is always saved in: your user folder › "Library" › "Application Support" › "Google SketchUp 6" › "SketchUp" > "Autosave."

Tara said...

Uh, what if you (very stupidly) hit "no" to save changes and lost two hours worth of work? Other than never being so stupid again, is there anything I can do? Help!