Tip: If Inkscape Crashes, You Can Recover Your Work from an Auto-save

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2024-12-08

Sometimes Inkscape crashes and you lose all your work. Fortunately, there are auto-saves. Unfortunately, it doesn't tell you about them for some reason!

To view your auto-saves on Inkscape, follow the following steps:

1: click Edit -> Preferences in the menubar to open the preferences dialog. This dialog has a list-detail layout.

2: select Input/Output -> Autosave on the left pane. You'll see a field labelled "Autosave directory" in the main pane.

A dialog titled "Preferences." On its left pane, "Input/Output -> Autosave" is selected. On its main pane, a heading reads "Autosave." Options: Enable autosave (checkbox), autosave directory (a textbox with a filepath), Interval (in minutes, set to 10). Maximum number of autosaves (50). — The "`Autosave`" section in Inkscape's preferences dialog.

That's where Inkscape saves its autosaves. Autosaving is enabled by default, so the autosaves should be there, if you are lucky.

On Windows 11, the directory's filepath may be something like this:

C:\Users\<your user name>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\inkscape

3: copy the filepath and paste it in file explorer's address bar, then press the Enter key to navigate to it.

On this folder, you'll be able to find several SVG files containing the autosaves by Inkscape.

Tip: sort the files in the folder by modified date to find the latest autosave.

Observations

No undo for you: I had Inkscape version 1.4 crash by pressing Ctrl+Z...

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