REAPER's autosave/backup system has fatal flaws, time to fix them!

REAPER's autosave/backup system has a few fatal flaws that continue to bite me. Why have your system so crippled if it's actually there and working fine in theory? You should really fix the following issues with it: 1. Enable it per default This should be a no-brainer. People will think of turning it on *after* they had their first major crash and already lost quite some data. Why have them run into that in the first place? 2. Unsaved projects need auto-save too This has bitten me a few times badly when I had sudden ideas, started with them in a creative flow without thinking of anything around me and then suddenly crash - and I haven't thought to save once. Now if REAPER had a smarter auto-save system that also took care of projects that never were saved before, this wouldn't have been an issue. 3. Warn me if a newer backup file to a project I'm opening is available I have multiple times opened an outdated project file after a crash because I was kinda lost in thoughts, and lost some progress that was actually available in a backup file, and noticed only much later. A simple dialog could have saved me. 4. Present me unsaved crashed backup saves of all projects on startup Again, much simpler open-source apps like Audacity are able to do this and prompt me at start if there is stuff to restore, so why can't REAPER do the same? In general the save system requires way too much thought of the user to enable it, keep its presence in mind and actually check for newer backup saves, remember they had something crashing before, ...

Not fatal. Items 2,3 and 4 are for dumb lazy users. I only need limit to number of backups saved. 1 is a good idea.

I like all 5 of these ideas. Of course, if I wasn't so lazy, I could just delete all the backups I don't need. :D

First thing i do when i open reaper is save a project with a name. It isnt hard or illogical.

The user is an idiot if they ignore the prompt!

I put them into the tracker now: FR 1: FR 2: FR 3: FR 4:

Basically if you are going to automatically start saving files there needs to be a workflow to remove them somehow because a 'few gigabytes' is a lot and I don't care how many terabytes you have.

Yeah, I'll never make any mistake on the computer. Backups are for wimps! Got your OS system drive cloned? Bigger wimp! Or something... The temper tantrum I'd likely throw if I even lost a minute of work would likely get the police called! I'd certainly like to see the backup system get automated project subfolder creating and using features. That's the root of the complaint right? In the same way that we just got features for creating a media subfolder of the parent project folder. But for now, I just go with the current feature set and keep a 'one size fits all' backup folder on a drive with Reaper pointed to it (preference setting) and saving a new backup rpp file every 2 minutes. It's a preference setting which makes it global for any/all projects weather they've been saved 100 times or zero. I have it time/date stamp the filename. "untitled-2015-04-06_1051.rpp-bak" is pretty easy to work with and find - for an example of an autosave from an as yet unsaved project. So for now, keep a general folder for backups and point Reaper to it on day 1. You'll always have that backup even if you never did your first 'save as' with the project. Operator error sucks!

And of course none of this matters until and unless this feature request actually gets some traction with the devs. I can see where this WOULD be a useful thing to have (the default auto backup of un-named files especially) provided it was user-selectable. But there again, it IS pretty darn hard to miss the "do you want fries with that?" box every time you go to close a project without saving it, isn`t it?

I think it's silly that reaper doesn't bother prompting to open the last backup file when there's been a crash. doesn't pretty much every other daw ever do that?