Review: ForeverSave

Imagine that the document you’ve spent half an hour working on suddenly disappears – thanks to an application crash or power surge. Now image that, after the fact, you realized you never saved your document along the way.

I found myself in exactly that scenario a few days ago while working on a PC Weenies comic. After putting the finishing touches on the third panel, Corel Painter X unexpectedly quit, taking half an hour’s worth of work along with it. Needless to say, I was not happy.

Shouldn’t my Mac automatically save my files as I’m working on them? Surely such a feature would be built-in to MacOS X by now, but inexplicably, it isn’t. So, I started scouring the web for a good third party solution.

Enter ForeverSave, by ToolForce Software.

ForeverSave ($14.95) will automatically auto-save and create back-ups of the document you are working on. With it, you can also specify the number of backups of your document you would like ForeverSave to keep. Restoring your documents is as simple as selecting the backed up document you want to restore and pressing one button.

ForeverSave is pretty easy to configure. Below are a few screenshots showing how I configured Adobe Photoshop CS4 for auto-save.

You can choose when ForeverSave should save, as the next two dialog boxes show.

You can specify the number of versions you’d like to keep and when to erase the files. You can also provide file-size restrictions for auto-save.

You can choose to have ForeverSave exclude specific folders.

You can choose whether or not back-up copies will be made…

…and also specify what to do with new Untitled documents:

The screenshot below shows the window in which your back-ups are stored. All backups you create are stored in ForeverSave’s own database.

All in all, for $15 – this program works really well. It takes care of one of my biggest gripes with Mac OS X (no auto-save built-in), and does it in a completely customizable manner. I have not tested ForeverSave with every application I use – but it works great for the tools I use the most: Corel Painter, Autodesk Sketchbook Pro and Photoshop.

Not sure if ForeverSave will work for your applications? No problem! The app has a free trial – use it for 30 days and see if it’s right for you. ForeverSave’s minimum requirements are Leopard and an Intel or PPC Mac.

Bonus: You can use one ForeverSave license for all your Macs if you are the only user.

ForeverSave gets 5 Bob Weiners!

Krishna November 5, 2010 auto-save applications, Mac OS X