Add an advanced preference option of disabling backup file generation

• Oct 6, 2019 - 15:30
Reported version
3.2
Type
Functional
Frequency
Many
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Reproducibility
Always
Status
closed
Regression
No
Workaround
Yes
Project

Comments

This looks to me like a clean solution. I personnaly have never used any of those backup files, but am always disturbed by the quantity that can get in a music directory:
BackupOverload.PNG

Attachment Size
BackupOverload.PNG 100.5 KB

No, MS Office (as well as MuseScore) removes autosave files on a clean file close, entirely different thing. needed to be able to recover from crashes (and you can disable those in MuseScore by setting the autosave timer to 0).

MuseScore has a redundant backup system. If you have not changed it, every 2 minutes an autosave file is created so you will not lose all of your work if you suffer a crash. These files are named SC*.mscz where * is a unique name MuseScore will recognize for this session. These are automatically deleted if you successfully close MuseScore. It also creates the invisible backup file called ,score.mscz. that is only visible if you have turned on show hidden files.

Workaround No Yes

2 Workarounds:

  1. Don't show hidden files in the first place, this is why they start with a dot (works on maxOS and Linux) and have a hidden attribute on Windows.
  2. Remove those backup files once you're sure to no longer need them.

It is just a backup, something to recover from after you saved and closed the score.
Finale and Sibelius has this too (I've just learned, never used those myself), several other programs do this too. Those don't hide their backups though, so cause even more clutter

The backup is in case something goes wrong with the main file. For example, you Save as another score on top of it for example. Another situation we see too often is that something goes wrong during the saving of a file and all or most of the file is filled with 0's. The only way to get any of the score back is to either find an auto save file or the backup. Otherwise the entire score is lost if the user has no other backup system

Fix version
3.5.0