AutoSave Sessions Mod

ybjrepnfr

@stardepp concur. it was an excellent and valuable mod, for a good few years. thank you @LonM. yet of course it's always nice each time any trusty old mod becomes redundant because the feature/function became embedded natively in v.

barefootcoder

@ybjrepnfr said in AutoSave Sessions Mod:

yet of course it's always nice each time any trusty old mod becomes redundant because the feature/function became embedded natively in v.

Is it redundant tho? It looks to me like the "autosave" in the experimental sessions panel only saves when you exit Vivaldi, and not every X minutes, which I gather @LonM 's mod did. Which would make the native/experimental feature useless for crash protection. Am I missing something?

ybjrepnfr

@barefootcoder i agree with you, but in my prior post, i was just accepting reality. ofc it's entirely up to @LonM , but i simply accepted their statement

@LonM said in AutoSave Sessions Mod:

there is no need for me to continue working on this mod, or the session panel mod

ybjrepnfr

@ybjrepnfr @barefootcoder

a possibly unwise addendum remark from me...

imo vivaldi has always had an extremely laissez-faire attitude to session preservation integrity & user convenience thereof. the existing manual session save tool, which we've had now for years, is very primitive & functionally-limited. this new, atm experimental, autosave sessions tool in the sessions panel, is welcome, but as you rightly identified, it's only a "save on orderly exit" function, so i'd be pretty fearful that it would not run in the event of a vivaldi crash. atm the forum seems to have many threads from users who've experienced similar scenarios. though dismissed by some here, imo their frustration & disgruntlement is entirely justified.

iirc, for years before @LonM's wonderful mod, i used a bash script &/or an automated timer [was it a cron job? all these years later, i've forgotten the details] to automatically back up my vivaldi session files direct from my vivaldi default directory, every five minutes. iirc it worked well, but i retired it once i had this thread's great mod. ha, thinks to self, maybe i need to find it, dust it off, & set it to work again...*

ofc, the best solution would be for the vivaldi devs to expand the functionality of the current experiment, to include user-configurable auto-saves each xx minutes / hours. given history, i am not holding my breath.

fwiw, users of the sidebery add-on in firefox get the benefit of user-configurable auto snapshots [ie, session backups], & it works very well. it galls me still that vivaldi has always lacked this [but ofc, so does firefox (natively), so its devs have no bragging rights here].

edited:
* yep, i did indeed now get the band back together again...

Spoiler

the backup runs each five minutes, saves all files from that directory to a dedicated other directory, does nothing if no tabs, sessions, workspaces changed since last backup, & deletes each backup after one day. being lazy & unskilled, i chose the easy gui route, rather than raw cron, for simple configuration including the subtleties i just mentioned.

LonM

I've poked the devs about why autosave doesn't operate on a timer. I'm hoping that as this is just an experimental feature at this stage, timed autosave will eventually be added too.

Pesala

Note that vivaldi://experiments and enable Sessions Panel solves most of the problems with sessions. It is not automatic, but it is now much easier to update existing sessions.

LonM

@all who have used this mod. I have some questions:

What is the time interval you were setting sessions to save as? (the default was 5 minutes)
How many of the last sessions were you keeping? (the default was keep the last 5)
Did you ever use this mod to keep sessions for a very long period of time, or was it just to keep the latest active sessions?

ybjrepnfr

@LonM i used the defaults, as for me the point of the mod in my use-case was purely disaster-recovery, not long-term session storage. i had no need for "permanent" or otherwise long storage here; simply put, once each 5' block expired without vivaldi crashing, its auto-saved session was only of potential use to me until the next successful auto-save.

valiowk

@LonM Pretty much the same as the reply above.

One thing to note is that with the old mod, it could be used to save sessions in private windows too (the inbuilt Autosave Sessions only saves regular windows). This was important to me because my use case for private windows isn't to keep work private from other people (I'm the only person using my computer), but rather to have automatic clearing of cookies for sites that I don't want to have tracking me. In fact, since I use Startup with Last Session, the disaster-recovery was primarily for private windows in case of a crash/computer automatically rebooting itself to update Windows.

KostyaKos

Is it working with the latest version? (6.2.3105.43)
I've installed it with the default options and got options for it in Settings, but it's not saving sessions - I can't see any files with VSESAUTOSAVE_ prefix. Should I do something else to make it work?

ybjrepnfr

@KostyaKos https://forum.vivaldi.net/post/658994

Gregor

@LonM said in AutoSave Sessions Mod:

@stardepp Yes, you've discovered it. As Vivaldi are working on this feature, there is no need for me to continue working on this mod, or the session panel mod.

Session panel does not support sessions/private windows, mainly because I used this modification and would like to continue using it

luetage

@Gregor There is really no point in spending the effort to keep this mod going. You could always do it yourself, if you think it’s worthwhile, of course.

Gregor

@luetage I have no idea about this. I thought it would be enough to do/fix it once and it would work and you didn't have to keep fiddling with it.