Backup of Mastodon files

[stefanhahmann]

User Story

A user of Mastodon recently reported that his .mastodon file was corrupted after/during a crash of Fiji/Mastodon that perhaps was related to #295. It is not exactly clear how .mastodon could get corrupted and currently no reproducible workflow exists that would create such a corrupt file. However, the result for the user is annoying, since if no other backup strategy existed potentially many hours of tracking may be lost.

Potential solution 1

• Save the mastodon project automatically every n minutes
  • Default of n could be 5
  • n could be set via the preference menu by the user
• The autosave would generate a projectname.backup.mastodon, after the project has been saved at least once as projectname.mastodon

Related to #310

[tinevez]

I like both ideas. Can you benchmark on your laptop how long saving a large mastodon file takes?

[stefanhahmann]

Can you benchmark on your laptop how long saving a large mastodon file takes?

On my machine I can produce saving times ranging from ~0,2s to ~2s (depending on project size, attributes, etc.).

[tinevez]

so it would not create big issues for the user experience.

[stefanhahmann]

so it would not create big issues for the user experience.

No, should not be too bad at the moment.