[cars]

This isn't a feature request, but more of a general "what's the best way to do this" kind of question.

Twice now I've lost some important work, and it's fair to say that human error was involved both times: the first time (short version) I started out with a template file and a day's worth of work, and after saving to a new file, I somehow ended up with two blank templates (there seems to be some confusion sometimes about which file is open and which file it's saving to). Mercifully, I had already exported to a smaller final PNG for web presentation, but I still feel bad about losing the original. Tonight, I spent a few hours inking, then thought to open the scratchpad for a reference image. The scratchpad crashed, and asked if I wanted to save it as a scrap. Well, no, I thought...I didn't have anything in the scratchpad yet. But, no--I was a dummy--it was MyPaint altogether that crashed, and I lost my one chance to retain all that work I had done.

Now that you've heard my sorry tale, what I'm trying to figure out is: what's the best way to back up my work from MyPaint as I go along, without obsessively hitting 'save' or obsessively saving my current work as scrap? The trouble is, when I'm deep in lettering, inking, and all that, I'm just not thinking about saving and resaving. I'm not just inking, but revising, experimenting, rewriting, and thinking about the next script.

I installed Back in Time, but that still only helps if you're hitting 'save' frequently. Back in Time backs up successive versions of files, and *would* have saved me in the first instance, but not the second--I had neglected to hit 'save' at any point during my session before the crash. Some action has to be performed by MyPaint.

One other thought I had was to program F2 to the stylus button. But that's not an available button option, and it's not that much better than hitting F2, anyway.--I still have to stop the process I'm involved with and think "OK, *save*". When tonight's crash hit, I had completely lost track of time, and at that moment I had no idea when I had saved last, if at all (which I hadn't).

"Cron jobs" is new territory for me, and I'm not sure how to apply it to MyPaint anyway. Is there a way to tell MyPaint to save from the command line? Or is there some other app that might work in conjunction with MyPaint to help me recover from goofs like this?

I wouldn't bother asking except, of course, MyPaint is exceedingly awesome. I'm a former "dead tree" cartoonist now doing everything but the borders in MyPaint, even the lettering: https://twitter.com/#!/carsonfire/status/166591897731739650/photo/1

Thanks ahead of time for any help!

[cars]

Even if there are no other ideas, I came up with something that helps *some*.

With the stylus in my right hand, I frequently tap the shortcut keys for undo, zoom, etc.--so I reset the shortcut for save from 'ctrl+s' to 'w' (for 'write').

This seems to be less of an interruption to the workflow, just having to tap 'w' occasionally in between operations. And using Back in Time gives me some assurance that I won't *regret* saving--I can go back to a prior version to recover saved-over work.

[maxy]

I don't think there is a good and simple technical solution... obviously, MyPaint shouldn't crash (well, for me it doesn't), but then a wrong manipulation by the user, like overwriting a precious file, or hitting the "discard" button too quickly, can be just as bad as any crash. Or even a power failure.

In general it sounds to me like what you want is autosave - but it must not interrupt your workflow. There was some work done on that: https://gna.org/bugs/?18421

[David Revoy]

I abuse of the 'F2' save-as-scrap as a sort of manual autosave when painting during long time and when I'm not in the mood to open the 'save as' modal dialog and put 2 hands on the keyboard to rename the file.  With this, I usually do a final 'save as' at the end of my painting session ; and later when I go on my 'scrap' folder , I simply clean the 'save-as-scrap' extra steps I kept.

[cars]

I've re-enacted the incident--trying to load the same PNG file into the Scratchpad, I get an error message and a choice to close or quit. Before, either I thought 'quit' meant specifically 'quit the *Scratchpad*, or else I was having a dyslexic moment, but I must have hit 'quit' and simply closed MyPaint--with hours of work unsaved.

I reopened MyPaint, and found it didn't want to load any PNGs into the Scratchpad that were made by Gimp. I then loaded a JPG, which opened just fine.

Later, I found that the PNG I had tried loading before the JPG now contained the image from the JPG!

I'm accident prone, but I know I'm not *that* accident prone. I don't go around accidentally saving all over my text files, for example. Can't put my finger on it, but there seems to be something about MyPaint that's making it a little *too* easy to save over and lose work.

Now, today, I opened a file called "manga.ora", which contains a comic book page template I made. I opened it and resaved it as "new.ora" in a different directory, because I wanted to draw a new pinup, but not sure what. I started sketching and decided I was going to do a "cosplay" type pinup called "Beryl-as-Powergirl.ora"...

I come back later, after restarting, and from 'open recent' I choose "new.ora", since I want to start a new pinup. Now I'm looking at... "Beryl-as-Powergirl.ora". Not just the art, but that's the file in the title bar. I close, reopen: from 'open recent', I choose "manga.ora", and I'm looking at..."Beryl-as-Powergirl.ora". I suspect something like this was going on earlier on, when I saved over a whole page of completed work: I thought I was in one *similar* file, then stripped and saved it under the wrong name.

This appears to only be an issue with 'open recent'; if I navigate to the file and open it directly, everything's fine. But I am kind of rattled.

[maxy]

IIRC scratchpad has an autosave when you quit; maybe something with that is buggy. If you can reproduce, please report it at the bugtracker. In general, if you have an obvious bug that you can reproduce, please use the bugtracker, not the forum.

[cars]

Oh, yeah, trying not to make this into a bug report, just reporting what I'm seeing to make sure that I'm not doing something wrong, or if I have something set wrong. Like with the Scratchpad autosave that you mention, I figure that I might just not understand how certain features are *intended* to work.

Trying 'open recent' again, I think I've found the very specific behavior--it's apparently not random, whatever is listed as '0', most recent, is what loads no matter what I pick. *That* I can't imagine being the intended behavior in any case, so I guess I gotta go learn how to make a bug report.