Lack of Aautosave is essentially making knime unusable
I can no longer rcommend this to colleagues due to this inexplicable and indefensible weakness
Hey @Andy_D,
sorry to hear. We are aware that this is still a missing piece. In the meantime, you could still switch back to the “classic” UI via the top-right menu.
Best,
Ben
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Thanks for replying benjamin. That was sent of in fury as I’d just lost several hours work - I’m a little calmer this morning.
Can you let me know When the autosave is scheduled to be enabled - it does seem odd that this is still outstanding on what is in all otherways a fantastic app.
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That is indeed very unfortunate.
I wish I could, but I cannot give you a dependable estimate right now.
Just to chime in on this. I deliberately turned off auto save years ago and never reenabled it. Primary reason is that it almost often intervenes with heavy data processing. When lots of data gets processed, hitting the auto save interval, the data crunching (or scraping) and saving intervene.
This most often caused a serious performance regression until the point I was forced to kill the Knime process and start all over.
Not certain if the auto-save process got any better / more intelligent but I made it a habit of hitting a CTRL + S once a while and live a much happier live since.
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I tend to almost always disable auto save as well. I do a ton of work in “template” or “working” files across many programs. Auto save assumes that your current work should be overwritten over the current file, which is often not the case for me. Typically I want to perform some action and leave files unsaved so the always open in their default state for the next action.
One thing that I do appreciate is notifications of how long it has been since the last save, or how many unsaved changes have been made to the file. Not saying that auto save shouldn’t be implemented for users that depend on it. It can save a ton of hassle, and I for one never trust temp file recoveries after a crash… Just saying that as a temporary measure and for users that prefer it over auto save, notifications could be very helpful. They could be subtle in early stages, but increasingly pronounced as time between a save extends or as the number of changes without a save grows. Perhaps the user could even set their own popup window notification threshold if they wish?
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@Andy_D Ib think you always have to have backup strategies for you work and also versioning is a thing regardless of the software being used.
DropBox is quite good at handling knime workflows. Also you might want to enable a thing like time machine on a Mac backing up to another drive. Also tools like Backblaze can help to create versions and backup.
You should aim to automate because manual backup will always be missing right when you would have needed it most.
As a workaround , you can get the best of both worlds and use a 3rd party software to send hotkeys (ctrl + s) e.g every 5 minutes. Autohotkey or power automate desktop should do the job well.
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That is really genius! Did you consider raising a feature request?
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I have long since wished for there to be an indication that I have manually changed something in the config since the last save, rather than that it is simply that the data has changed.
Whenever I execute a Workflow, KNIME will tell me it had been modified. To me, having no clear separation between data and “code” (ie workflow config) changes is suboptimal. Without knowing this difference, I’m continually having to assume I’ve changed something when possibly in reality I haven’t.
I get that for some people, saving the data is also necessary but for me, I don’t generally want to waste time saving unless it’s a manual config change.
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On second thought, saving a workflow w/o any data or just the altered node configuration might be a key to auto-save without interfering with a compute intense processing.
Why don’t we submit a feature request like this?`
In order to
- Prevent collision of auto-save and compute intense processing
- Allow to save altered node configuration only
- Speed up the saving process
I wan to
Be able to save only the changed node configuration, skipping the newly or still in progress of being calculated data.
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If and when an autosave option makes its way into Modern UI, I would hope that it is more predictable than the Auto Save in Classic UI, which I have on occasion found to be beneficial, but often not so much.
This morning, I accidentally opened the Autosave version of a very trivial workflow and was reminded why I would only open the autosave version if I have no other choice, because I found that invariably it is corrupted, with the odd node (and many its many connections) not present. I have found this to be the case across many versions of KNIME, and so I don’t trust it.
Although in CUI I have auto-save switched on, I always use the original even if there is an auto-save suggested to me, and I only refer to the autosave version in the event that a crash has occurred.
e.g. below are (left) original saved workflow, and (right) autosave, in KNIME 4.7.8, which is typical of what I have often seen when opening an auto-saved copy of a workflow:
Fortunately KNIME itself is usually not the reason why I would require auto-save. The most likely cause is that I forgot to save a modified workflow prior to running, and I have then left it running through the evening because it will take several hours, only to come back and discover that the corporate IT have imposed a software update and automatic restart, (for what is actually a non-critical update that could have just given me the option to manually restart at some point in the next 24 hours), thus causing KNIME to close and the system to reboot.
Sometimes I wonder what goes through the minds of corporate IT these days! I appear to be an inconvenience to them! 
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