[MU4 Issue] Option to disable Backup feature is missing in MS4

[LoveJessyChen]

Bug:

Option to disable Backup feature (like in MS3) is missing in MS4

Also see comment

Platform information macOS 13.0.1

Additional content #23386

[Tantacrul]

This is an MS3.6 issue, right?

[Tantacrul]

I have unfortunately very little idea what it is you are suggesting actually - although I suspect some other community folk may know better than I. @MarcSabatella - any idea what this is? I'm sure it's something we discussed 2 years ago or so but it has escaped me now

[MarcSabatella]

@Tantacrul MuseScore has always made an automatic backup copy of your score when you first save it during a session. it also autosaves a separate copy every few minutes to use in recovering from a crash. At some point in the last few years, someone decided to add options to allow the user to specify where these backups are stored, and also, to disable the automatic backups completely.

Frankly, I'm not sure what the purpose of either of those options would be, really - seems like asking for trouble for me. But a few users seemed to think it would help them somehow. And this option is not present in MU4. Backups are always made, and their location is not changeable.

[Tantacrul]

@LoveJessyChen - can I ask why you would want this feature?

[Tantacrul]

Ah! So you're actually reporting a bug here.

Let me try that...

[MarcSabatella]

I don't see that as a bug - when you move a file to another folder using your OS file browser, there is no way the system could know to move the backup along with it. Nor should it, necessarily. You are certainly welcome to move the backups manually, or delete them, of course.

Score files are quite small normally, there should be very little concern about disk space just from a single backup file per score. But if for whatever reason that is a concern, disabling backup would be sufficient to address it. I am still not seeing the point of overriding the default location for them.

[Tantacrul]

Yeah, I'm trying to figure out repro steps and can't get to any issue. For sure, if you move a score while it is open in MS, the the autosaved file naturally doesn't move with it. I don't get it.

[cbjeukendrup]

@Tantacrul It's quite simple, but only if you have turned on "Show hidden folders" in Finder :) You can do this by pressing Cmd + Shift + . (dot).

1. Create a score. Save it in folder X.
2. Modify the score and save the changes.
3. In Finder, you see that a folder .mscbackup is created inside folder X. Inside this folder, there is a backup of the file (this backup contains the state of the file before saving, which is indeed how it should work, but that doesn't matter for this story)
4. Close the file in MuseScore.
5. Move the file to folder Y.
6. Open the file from folder Y in MuseScore.
7. Modify the score and save the changes.
8. In Finder, you see that another .mscbackup folder is created inside folder Y, which contains again a pre-save backup of the file. This is all correct so far.

What's being discussed here, is what should happen with the old backup inside folder X, which continues to exist.

I don't think we should try to delete that, since that would make the backup feature less reliable. Furthermore, it would be impossible, because MuseScore cannot detect that you moved the file on your computer (it sees no relation between the old and new path). I really think we should not try to fix this, as it can only cause bigger trouble. In fact I think it's not a bug, but rather an unfortunate fact of life.

However, I do think we should provide an option to disable the backup feature, for people who care about that tiny bit of wasted disk space. Also, especially on macOS, you might argue that the backup feature is somewhat redundant since you already have Time Machine, the system wide backup solution. (Of course, I know that this works quite differently from MuseScore's backup feature, but still.) Therefore I think we should provide the option to disable backups, just in Preferences > Advanced, like in MS 3.6.2.

[DmitryArefiev]

However, I do think we should provide an option to disable the backup feature, for people who care about that tiny bit of wasted disk space. Also, especially on macOS, you might argue that the backup feature is somewhat redundant since you already have Time Machine, the system wide backup solution. (Of course, I know that this works quite differently from MuseScore's backup feature, but still.) Therefore I think we should provide the option to disable backups, just in Preferences > Advanced, like in MS 3.6.2.

@bkunda I agree with Casper, some users may want to disable backups and not create .mscbackup hidden folder on their disk drives. We can easily put the main option (generateBackup checkbox) to Preferences>Advanced (like in MS3.6.2):

And actually, it's not a feature request it's a bug (missing MS3 functionality)

[DmitryArefiev]

To set .mscbackup to another directory

This is logged separately (#23386)

I'll modify the summary and description

[cbjeukendrup]

Since this is a relatively niche and uncommon request, we cannot give it a very high priority of course. Currently there is no concrete schedule for this issue. Contributors are welcome to work on this, since it is unlikely that the internal team will work on this within the next few months.

[cbjeukendrup]

A new version number isn't going to change much about this issue. However, this Pull Request, made by a contributor, is: https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/25178