Autosave is a saving function in many computer applications and video games which automatically saves the current changes or progress in the program or game, intending to prevent data loss should the user be otherwise prevented from doing so manually by a crash, freeze or user error.
It has traditionally been seen as a feature to protect documents in an application or system failure (crash), and autosave backups are often purged whenever the user finishes their work.
[2] For example, in Microsoft Office, this option is called AutoRecover and, by default, saves the document every ten minutes in the temporary file directory.
[3] Mac OS 10.7 Lion added an autosave feature that is available to some applications, and works in conjunction with Time Machine-like functionality to periodically save all versions of a document.
Saves are made on snapshots of the document data and occur in a separate thread, so the user is never paused during this process.