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Did you know... Where Visual Studio saves auto-recovered files in the case of an unexpected shutdown? - #151

We used to tease the tester who owned testing this auto-recovery feature that every time there was a power failure in the building (due to a storm, etc), he was standing near some big red switch in the off position with a big grin on his face, because he just wanted everyone to test his features for him in a real-world scenario.  Poor Jeremy, always being blamed for the power failures.

Under Tools - Options - Environment, you'll find the AutoRecover page

Tools Options Environment AutoRecover

Note that you can opt-out of the AutoRecover feature by unchecking Save AutoRecover information.  I'm very curious if anyone has opted out here, and why.

The rest of the page is self-explanatory, but did you know where VS saves these auto-recovered files?  They are saved in \...\My Documents\Visual Studio <version>\Backup Files\<projectname>.

Backup Files location

In case you (hopefully) have never seen the AutoRecover dialog, here's what it looks like.  It'll pop up the next time you launch VS.  You have the options to either use the backup file or ignore it.

image

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Posted: Thursday, February 14, 2008 3:00 AM by saraford

Comments

MSDN Blog Postings » 2008 » February » 14 said:

PingBack from http://msdnrss.thecoderblogs.com/2008/02/14/

# February 14, 2008 7:14 AM

DotNetKicks.com said:

You've been kicked (a good thing) - Trackback from DotNetKicks.com

# February 14, 2008 8:44 AM

tomsmi said:

I've opted out of autorecover before.  On one of my computers, every 5 minutes the UI would become unresponsive for several seconds because AutoRecover was processing.  It was very annoying.  So I turned it off.

# February 14, 2008 12:27 PM

El Ponderado said:

Yeah, I've opted out as well.  Same reason as was mentioned by tomsmi.  Very annoying pauses.  (Large solution)

# February 14, 2008 3:20 PM

Bob Monedero said:

There are a lot of developers at my office that opt out of auto-recovery.  The biggest problem with it that we encounter here is that it can add up to a minute of time during loading the solution before we can start working.  Of course, it doesn't help that our solution has over 200 projects in it.

# February 14, 2008 3:28 PM

Brent Rockwood said:

Visual Studio has a very bad habit of saving files which are not actually user actionable "Documents" in My Documents.  For most things, such as Templates, they can be moved to AppData.  However, it looks like the autorecover stuff cannot be redirected.  This is bad practice and does not follow the Windows guidelines.

# February 28, 2008 10:40 AM

xjb said:

本篇包括tip151-tip160http://www.watch-life.net/visual-studio/visual-studio-2008-tip-day-16.html#151、意外...

# December 25, 2008 9:31 PM
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