We have had a handful of cases where ArchiCAD autosave recovery has failed when it should have succeeded. We have also had cases of human error where the autosave never had a chance.
Since ArchiCAD deletes the autosave data once it decides, right or wrong, that it's not needed, you don't get a second chance.
Unless you routinely back up the autosave folders. You'd want to do this automatically of course. Automator might work, but as far as I can tell Automator actions can't run hidden. (You could use Script Timer to schedule them.)
Since OS X is built on BSD, a flavor of Unix, it includes the system utility cron. Cron is a scheduler for command line tasks. For us, 'command line' = the Terminal application.
Command line people, and I am most emphatically not one of them, can do virtually anything to their system via the Terminal. At the very simplest, you could do anything for which you are accustomed to using the Finder, such as copy files and folders.
Any command that could typed into the command line can be set to automatically run on a schedule with cron.
Cutting to the chase, and pardon the jargon, all you need to do is add this to your crontab:
0,15,30,45 * * * mon,tue,wed,thu,fri find ~/Library/Application\ Support/Graphisoft -name "ArchiCAD\ AutoSave\ Folder*" -exec cp -R -f '{}' ~/Documents/ACTempBackup/ \;
Note: The command will create the ACTempBackup folder if it doesn't exist.
There are a few ways to do this. The most user-friendly is the application CronniX.
This command copies all the 'ArchiCAD AutoSave' folders from ~/Library/Application Support every fifteen minutes on weekdays. You could adjust the interval or paths as you like.
If you have an autosave failure, you can use the data at Documents/ACTempBackup and this technique to recover the project.
And. Once again. Save more often.
Thanks to Karl O for the Unix hint.
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