Autosave and crash recovery in PDF by Zaweba

Power cuts, frozen laptops and Windows updates that restart at the worst moment all have one thing in common: they don't wait for you to save. PDF by Zaweba keeps a quiet safety copy of your unsaved work so that when something goes wrong, you lose a minute at most rather than an afternoon.

What autosave does

Every 60 seconds, documents with unsaved changes are copied to a recovery folder. Only documents you have changed are copied, and the copy goes to the recovery folder, not over your file. Your original PDF stays exactly as you last saved it until you choose to save. Autosave is a backup of work in progress, not a save made on your behalf.

The interval can be changed in settings. A shorter interval means less to lose; a longer one means fewer copies being written while you work. Setting it to 0 turns autosave off.

After a crash

If the app closes unexpectedly, the next time you start it, it offers to recover the documents it had copied or to discard them. Recover brings them back with your unsaved changes, ready for you to check and save properly. Discard throws the copies away, which is the right choice if the changes were experiments you didn't want anyway.

A clean exit removes the recovery copies. When you close the app normally, having saved or chosen not to save, there is nothing left to recover, so the folder is tidied up and old copies don't build up.

Protected documents stay protected

A password-protected PDF stays protected in the recovery copy. That is an important detail. The recovery folder is on your PC, but it would be no good if a document you had locked with a password ended up sitting there unprotected. Anyone who comes across the copy needs the same password as the original.

Making the most of it

Autosave is a safety net, not a replacement for saving. Save whenever you reach a point you are happy with, and think of autosave as covering the gap between saves.

After a recovery, look over the document before you save it. The copy is from the last autosave, so the final few moments of work before the crash may be missing. Check the part you were working on and redo anything small that didn't make it.

Only turn autosave off if you have a real reason. On a slow network drive, or if you are only ever reading PDFs, you might not want copies written. For anyone editing, the default of 60 seconds is a good balance.

How it fits with undo and revert

PDF by Zaweba has three layers of protection that work together. Undo, with each change as a named step, guards against your own slips. Revert to saved takes you back to the last saved version. Autosave and crash recovery guard against the computer letting you down. Between them, the work you put into a PDF is hard to lose.

You will probably never think about this feature until the day the laptop battery dies in the middle of a long edit. On that day, the offer to recover your work when you restart will be very welcome.