I was just at a party where i overheard a teacher talking about how her students were so accustomed to things always saving in real time (like Google docs) that she had a lot of trouble teaching them that they had to manually save something.
Which triggers my Need To Save circuits. It really bothers me that there’s no Save button. I’m supposed to just close a spreadsheet and trust that it’s saved? Dadburn Twenty-First Century tomfoolery!
Of course, I’ve been diligently saving graphics files since the dark ages… before Photoshop (I had to write down the first version I used on a form, and it was a long number, because it was a Pre-release Tester’s Version).
I ran into the same issues with autosave. Some drawings are lightweight and can be saved quickly, while others have gargantuan xrefs (one had a massive aerial, like you mentioned). Ultimately, it doesn’t take too long to type QS [space] and hopefully one develops a good habit it of doing so. Nonetheless I’ve been burnt a few times myself.
We had one new guy learn the hard way when he worked some unholy black magic on a drawing and corrupted it. He audited it to fix the errors, which had the effect of migrating all the linework to new layers with names like “AUDIT_8683582.” Then he did something (God knows what) that set all the layer colors to 15 and continuous linetype. Then he did a purge which removed all the old layers and linetypes (which no longer had anything associated with them thanks to audit and whatever else he did). To top it all off he must’ve tried to paste in linework from some other drawing (possibly the entire drawing) as the total number of layers was like 5x what it should’ve been. Took some time to fix that.
The editor I use automatically saves after 20 lines have changed (including being added), a number I can set. I don’t recall having lost anything. But 19 lines of work is not irreparable. I guess I would also like it if it also saved after 5 minutes of no changes.