Saving and recovery
Saving a project, reading the save indicator, setting up auto-save, and getting your work back after a crash.
File ▸ Save writes the project back to the file it came from. A project that has never been saved has no file yet, so Save falls through to Save As and asks where to put it.
File ▸ Save As… always asks for a location. The dialog offers untitled.cls as a starting name and appends .cls if you leave the extension off. Saving under a new name renames the document tab, points the tab at the new file, and adds it to Recent, which makes Save As the way to take a snapshot before a risky change.
| CtrlS | Save |
| CtrlShiftS | Save As |
| CtrlW | Close the current document |
| CtrlO | Open a project |
What a save writes when a layer is posed
A rigged layer has two sets of values at once: the rest pose you built in Edit Mode, and whatever the playhead is showing in Animate Mode. A save always writes the rest pose, so the file never picks up frame 40's bend as if it were the shape you drew.
Which value counts as the rest pose depends on where you are. In Edit Mode, at frame 0, the rest pose is simply what you see, so any change you make there is what gets written, including one you make after coming back from Animate Mode. In Animate Mode, a channel falls back to the stored rest pose only when something is actually posing it: a keyframe on that channel, a bone binding, or an action driving it. A property nothing is animating keeps the value you gave it, wherever you gave it.
The same holds for where you are standing when you save. Ctrl+S inside a symbol, or inside a symbol nested in another symbol, writes the whole project rather than the part of it you have stepped into, and puts you back exactly where you were. There is no need to step out first, and it applies to Save, Save As and the auto-save recovery copy alike.
The save indicator
A document with unsaved changes carries an asterisk after its name in the document tab. When you save, a small pill appears in the status bar next to the logo: it fills from left to right in the accent colour while it reads Saving, reads Saved once the bar is full, then fades away. The fill width is what tells you which stage you are at, so both stages share one colour.
A save that fails is the exception. It reads Save failed in red and holds far longer before fading, because unlike a success it is telling you something you do not already know.
An auto-save shows the same pill with different wording, Auto-saving, then Auto-saved, so you can tell at a glance whether that was your save or the timer's. The asterisk stays on the tab after an auto-save, because an auto-save does not write to your project file.
Auto-save
Auto-save is off until you turn it on, in Preferences ▸ General under Performance.
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Auto-Save | Off | Turns the timer on |
| Auto-Save Interval (min) | 5 | How often it fires, from 1 to 120 minutes |
When the timer comes round, Celas Studio writes a separate recovery copy next to your project, named after it: a project saved as walk.cls gets walk.autosave.cls. Your own file is never touched, the unsaved-changes asterisk stays put, and the same recovery file is overwritten each time rather than piling up.
The timer waits for a quiet moment. It holds off while the left mouse button is down or an edit is still in progress and fires the instant you let go, so it never captures a half-finished stroke or drag. If nothing has changed since the last recovery copy, it skips the write.
A document you have never saved is covered too. It has no project path to sit beside, so its recovery copy goes into the application data folder instead, named after the document's id: untitled-3.autosave.cls and so on. Saving the document for the first time deletes that copy, because the real file has taken over.
Recovering after a crash
Celas Studio looks for recovery copies at startup and offers them. The Recover Unsaved Work dialog appears with the files it found, untitled documents from the application data folder, plus any project whose recovery copy is newer than the project itself, and three choices:
- Open Recovered Documents: each one opens as its own document, so nothing overwrites your project file. Compare, then Save As over the original if the recovered version is the one you want.
- Discard Them: deletes the copies.
- Not Now: leaves them on disk. They will be offered again next launch.
A project whose recovery copy is OLDER than the project is not offered: you already saved past it, so the copy is stale. Saving a document removes its recovery copy outright.
A hard crash also triggers a separate, last-ditch rescue: the crash handler writes a copy of whatever document was open to rescued.cls in the application data folder, and the crash-report dialog on the next launch offers to open it. That one runs on a damaged process, so treat it as a best effort rather than a guarantee. Auto-Save is the reliable safety net.
The unsaved-changes prompt
Closing a document that has unsaved changes brings up the Unsaved Changes dialog, asking whether to save before closing. Save writes the file and then closes the tab; Don't Save discards the changes; Cancel leaves everything as it was. If Save leads to a Save As dialog that you then cancel, the tab stays open.
Quitting with any modified document open asks once for all of them, with Save All, Don't Save and Cancel. Save All walks through every modified document, including background tabs, and prompting for a location for any that were never saved, and only quits when all of them are written.
Backups
Celas Studio keeps no version history and no rolling backups. The only automatic copies it makes are the auto-save recovery file described above, overwritten every interval, and the crash-time rescue file.
For anything you would hate to lose, make the copies yourself: Save As under a numbered name at the end of a session, and keep the project folder, with its linked video and audio, in whatever backup or sync your machine already has.