Community Spring Cleaning week is here! Join your fellow Maveryx in digging through your old posts and marking comments on them as solved. Learn more here!

Alteryx Designer Desktop Knowledge Base

Definitive answers from Designer Desktop experts.

All About Autosave

DanC
Moderator
Moderator
Created

Unbeknown to many, by default Alteryx saves your open workflows every 10 minutes, keeps the last three iterations of them, and keeps them around for 30 days since the last save. As you can imagine, many people are very happy to find this out when they frantically come to Support hoping for some way to resurrect a deleted or corrupted workflow. I have always found Alteryx to be an incredibly stable program, but it is nice knowing that my workflows will still be there in an unfortunate emergency, self-inflicted or otherwise.

 

From my experience, this is something that a lot of people either ignore or don't realize is there. What most people do realize is that for some reason, every one of their workflows has a similarly named copy, but with a .bak extension. The important thing to know is that when you least expect it, this file can become a lifesaver if something happens to your original workflow, so please don't delete them!

 

To recover autosaved files: Go to File > Open Autosaved Files

To change the settings: Go to the 'Advanced' tab under Options > User Settings > Edit User Settings

 

Open an Autosaved Workflow

 

To open an autosaved file, simply go to the menu File > Open Workflow > Open Autosaved Files:

 

2019-04-22_14-48-27.png

 

The following screen will open:

 

OpenAutosavedFiles.png

 

You simply click on the iteration of the workflow that you want to restore and then you have the choice of either opening that workflow or saving it to a directory. If you open the workflow directly from this screen, Alteryx will open up a temporary version of that workflow that you will need to save to an appropriate directory of your choosing.

 

Edit the Autosave Defaults

 

To edit the Autosave settings, go to 'Advanced' tab under Options > User Settings> Edit User Settings.

 

The Autosave options are highlighted in yellow below. As you can see below, you can adjust the interval in minutes that the workflow is saved, how many iterationsof the workflow to save and how many days to keep the file.

 

UserSettings.png

 

As you can see, the Autosave feature is very straightforward, while at the same time it can be the most important feature you ever used!

 

Check it out in our Help too!

Comments
adrilarotta
8 - Asteroid

You saved my life with this post, thanks

someotherguy
8 - Asteroid

I don't see open Autosave files as an option

 

Version: 2022.3.1.395

Running Non-Elevated

 

someotherguy_0-1678208597376.png

 

If i navigate to C:\Users\[name]\AppData\Local\Alteryx\Autosave i can see that they exist