Autosave & recovery
DNA quietly saves a backup of your project as you work, and offers to bring back your edits if a session ever ends badly.
How autosave works
While you work, DNA keeps a running backup next to your project so you never lose more than a few minutes if something goes wrong. The backup is written on a timer — every few minutes by default — and lives right beside your .dna file rather than replacing it. Your manual saves are always left untouched.
You can set how often autosave runs in Preferences. The interval is kept between 1 and 60 minutes, so a stray setting can't switch autosave off or make it fire constantly.
Autosave never overwrites your manual save. It writes separate backup files alongside it, so the version you saved by hand is always exactly where you left it.
Rotating backups
Rather than keeping a single backup, DNA keeps a small stack of the most recent ones. Each time autosave runs, the newest backup becomes number one and the older ones shift down — the oldest beyond your chosen limit is dropped.
project.dna your last manual save (untouched)
project.dna.autosave.1 newest autosave
project.dna.autosave.2 next newest
project.dna.autosave.3 oldest keptYou choose how many backups to keep (up to 10) in Preferences. Keeping a few means you can step back to a slightly earlier point, not just the very last tick — handy if the most recent autosave already includes a change you'd rather undo.
Lowering the backup count later cleans up the extra files automatically on the next autosave, so you won't accumulate stale backups.
Crash recovery
If a session ends unexpectedly — a power cut, a forced quit, an app crash — DNA notices the next time you open the project. If there's a backup with edits newer than your last manual save, it shows a recovery prompt:
Yes, restore — brings back your unsaved edits from the most recent backup.
No, discard — keeps the project as it was at your last manual save and clears the recovered edits.
The prompt tells you which backup it found so you know what you're restoring. If your last manual save is already the newest copy on disk, there's nothing to recover and DNA opens straight into your project as normal.
Choosing Discard is permanent — once you confirm it, the recovered edits are gone. If you're unsure, pick Restore; you can always step back afterwards or close without saving.
Even a project you've never saved by hand gets this safety net. If autosave captured your work-in-progress before the crash, that backup becomes your recovery point, so an untitled project isn't lost just because you hadn't named it yet.
For a closer look at the recovery prompt and what to do when a session won't reopen cleanly, see Crash recovery.