@Martin an automatic save procedure might be useful for people who don't want to think about their own safety.
Why will you make your programming so complicated? An litte "+" button that increase the filenumber is much easier to make, I think.
AND there is one important thing against the totally automatic: If I don't make my own backup, and any software will do that for me, I forget to make some additional backups, because the automatic backups will delete some time the oldest backup without my notice.
I had that in the past. I "trusted" an software automatic backup. The backup saved 32 backups and made an new one each half hour. So I worked 2 days (>16 hours) an then the first backup was deleted. At the 3. day I recognized that I made a big mistake... but the backup was gone...
Its a hard work for a programmer to make it user resistant. And if the first backup is deleted - some day some user will cry.
So let the creative people do their own backups :)
If you will do an automatic, then please make this "+" button, too, because I will never use an automatic for my safety, so I would be never angry about you if I loose my data.
Maybe, if there are users who won't work always with a new increased file-number - you could make an "copy as (increase)", so all the backups are still there, and I can work with the file without numbers.
The rest of your idea could be great, but leave an manually version in it.
@Jo
Where it “is” a big deal though is for people that don’t understand that it works that way.
people should learn the very simple things to safe themselfs against dataloss. I know lot of people that don't want to learn that, but its necessary.
When someone drives a car - they should now where the brakes are. Even if the don't want to learn that. And if the brakes have an comfort like ABS and they will drive faster, because they have ABS, but if they can't brake manually - lots of accidents happens more because of that safeness.