What is Autosave?
Autosave is a software function in any program or application that saves an in-progress file automatically in order to prevent accidental data loss. One place you may have seen auto-save is in Microsoft Office applications, such as Microsoft Word, but the function is also used on other computers, applications and in web applications such as Google Docs among others.
Why autosave is helpful
Autosave a convenient feature since accidents happen with technology. Losing power, a computer failure, a loss of your Internet connection or spilled coffee on a keyboard (an example from my real life) can all cause your technology to stop working. When the technology stops working, it's possible that any one application program you've been working with may not save your current activity, such as when you're working on a document.
Imagine that you are working on a lengthy, multi-page document and the electricity in your house suddenly cuts out. Your computer loses power in the middle of your work. If you haven't saved the file – you haven't created a permanent copy of your work on your computer since you began working on it – your work is lost completely.
How Autosave works
In order to prevent this, autosave creates a copy of your work periodically while you are working on it. If you work was autosaved, when you power your computer on again, you can load the application that you were using, and the application will ask you if you want to restore the lost information. Because the autosave feature has made a copy automatically while you were working, it will be able to restore your work from the most recent autosave file.
Autosave isn't perfect in saving work-in-progress. Some programs autosave once every several minutes or even every five minutes. If your computer's power is interrupted between one autosave and the next, you will lose all of the work made after the last autosave. It is possible in some programs to change how frequently you want autosave to take place, and a programs do do not have any Auto Save function at all. Review the documentation for the software you are using to clarify these details.
Autosave and Versions
Autosave is not the only solution to saving your progress. Apple Mac computers using Apple's OS X operating system have a built-in software application called “Time Machine,” which creates many copies of the same file at different points in the file's progress. This allows the user to reopen copies of the file they were working on at many different points in the file's history.
For example, imagine that you are writing a lengthy business letter and you have made many revisions since you began. Time Machine would have created copies of the letter at different times since you began revising, so you can conveniently reload older revisions of the letter if necessary.
Saving multiple copies of a file allows you to manage different versions of the same file, so you can go back to a previous version to review what it was like and compare the changes made in each version. This type of version management feature is often used in teamwork applications so different people can work on the same document or file and track the document or file as new changes are made. Each time the file or document is opened and edited, the previous version is automatically saved as a “version” for review if necessary.
Some useful tips on Autosave
While Autosave is a useful feature and will let you recover work from a certain point in time, it is much safer instead to manually save files at your own pace. Because autosave typically creates files separately from your original file, you can save files manually and take advantage of autosave simultaneously and have the best of both methods.
Autosave doesn't replace the need for a backup to your data, since your autosave files are usually in the same location as your original files for any application. You should use a backup disk and application for any files on your local computer hard drive, backup your smartphone, and even consider using a cloud file storage service since the cloud service (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Dropbox, etc.) makes backups of all of your files.
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