Recovering Data

Computer crashes, power outages, or simply forgetting to save can result in the loss or corruption of your work. You can use Blender’s Auto Save feature to reduce the chance of losing files when such events occur.

There are options to save a backup of your files like Auto Save that saves your file automatically over time, and Save on Quit, which saves your blend-file automatically when you exit Blender. In addition to these functions being enabled by default, the Save on Quit functionality cannot be disabled.

Note

For your actions, there are options like Undo, Redo and an Undo History, used to roll back from mistakes under normal operation, or return back to a specific action. See Undo & Redo.

The File tab of the Preferences allows you to configure the two ways that Blender provides for you to regress to a previous version of your work. See Auto Save Preferences for details.

Recovering Auto Saves

Reference

Menu:File ‣ Recover ‣ Last Session
Menu:File ‣ Recover ‣ Auto Save…

Recover Last Session

The Recover Last Session will open the quit.blend file that is saved into the Temporary Directory when you quit Blender under normal operation. Note that files in your temporary directory may be deleted when you reboot your computer (depending on your system configuration).

Recover Auto Save

The Recover Auto Save allows you to open the Auto Saved file. You will have to navigate to your Temporary Directory. The Auto Saved files are named using a random number and have a blend extension.

It is important, when browsing, to enable the detailed list view. Otherwise, you will not be able to figure out the dates of the auto-saved blend-files. See Fig. File Browser with detailed view selected..

../_images/troubleshooting_recover_display-file-date.png

File Browser with detailed view selected.

Warning

When recovering an Auto Saved file, you will lose any changes made since the last Auto Save was performed. Only one Auto Saved file exists for each project, i.e. Blender does not keep older versions. Hence, you will not be able to go back more than a few minutes with this tool.