Popping in to say it just caused an error while Dropbox was syncing and it caused it to save a 0kb file (the contents were lost).
I want to turn auto save off because I don’t want to keep disabling my Dropbox sync to prevent problems just because I want to back up my files.
I just used Dropbox’s file history feature to recover it before the failure. But on top of all the reasons above, I don’t want to have to keep jumping through these hoops just to be able to confidently use Obsidian.
Thanks for the answer!
PS: To be honest, it sounds really horrible like running Tesla on rechargeable AA batteries, which are powered by a steam engine burning wood. 
I just don’t want that OneDrive syncs my notes every few seconds.
I decided against putting up a lengthy post about concerns about auto-save, so instead I just request this feature.
Cheers
This is a revelation for me. I finally understand why I have felt Obsidian being so slow for me, its because of how Obsidian autosaves constantly and OneDrive is having a hissy fit over its syncing.
I love autosave but just a simple setting on how frequent it is would be extremely welcome.
Until then I will have to either live with it, regularly disable OneDrive syncing or stop using OneDrive.
I ended up here coming from threads about locking the editing view, after realizing that autosave is the real problem I’m having. I’m currently learning Obsidian and autosave is constantly messing up things for me. I’d love to be able do Ctrl+save a file at some point. Do a bunch of stuff to it and then, if I screwed up, simply close, then open the note again and be back to the last saved stage of my work. Or if this isn’t possible, at list, to have an option to lock a note that i’m done working on. Ideally locking the actual content, not only the view mode. Because I would often want to see source code of the note as a reference, while not being able to destroy it. In fact I’d really, really appreciate both options. Right now I’m kind of scared to use Obsidian at all, and especially for any topic particularly significant for me.
@Iconca Did you know about the built-in file recovery plugin? It periodically snapshots all your notes so you can go back to previous versions easily. The default is save every 5 min, but you can change that.
Also, consider using temporary notes for that case.
Until I realized what’s going on I didn’t know that I needed them 
Mostly because ctrl+s is just so intuitive and easy. Somebody in a different thread already mentioned to me simple manual snapshots and auto-snapshot with git. I’ll definitely try to incorporate one of those things. I just checked that I have recovery plugin enabled as default. So thanks for the tip. For now it is something useful. And I’ll see how it will go further.
You mean like like create a test notes? That’s actually what I’m doing. And I’ve already managed to do most of unfortunate things other people mentioned here. Destroy a finished template. Loose few sentences and paragraphs. Even magically fuff some notes (probably overwrite one note with another 
). But hey. It’s all trials and errors. I’ll get there.
Yikes! Auto-save has been kind to me. Good luck!
Thanks
Two years since the first post. Please, this feature is a must for many people.
Thank you all for this amazing app!
This is still incredibly annoying. I have my vault saving to a cloud share, and I can see file update notifications on my other devices while typing on a file.
Just a +1 that this autosave problem is a complete disaster for me. Drains battery, nackers SSD, and creates thousands of transfers across synching systems very few minutes (so it is impossible to go back in time more than a few minutes even if hundreds of backups of every file are saved). Massively slow too. Incredibly annoying puts it mildly…
Yup – autosave is good and fine. It is just the frequency that is ludicrous, disk- damaging and battery draining and system slowing. Even something like 10 seconds wouldn’t give tens of thousands of saved files in a day of work.
+1…I have my vault on icloud and literally every character I type triggers a sync. This is crazy. Please fix or allow us to specify some interval for save
Like at least one other I have started using FreeFileSync to avoid auto-save problems.
Have one PC running FreeFileSync with its RealTimeSyc monitoring Obsidian vault on iCloud with a copy of the vault on BOX, using two-way sync. My default vault on the PC is in BOX, my default vault on IOS devices is in iCloud and I also have a vault on a Windows Laptop which is kept updated by BOX.
After two weeks I am very happy with this arrangement and happy to recommend others have a look at it too. FreeFileSync is open source and available here https://freefilesync.org/
Ian
I didn’t realise this OneDrive with (2s interval?) autosave is what affecting me. I haven’t follow this thread for awhile.
+1 for the suggestion to have higher intervals and/or option to disable autosave.
Most of time I do rapid writing and there will be noticeable lag every time autosave run and OneDrive is syncing at the same time.
Hope the Dev can consider this.
Same issue. The amounts of writes Obsidian is causing is prob. astronomical for a heavy user who writes a lot. It is almost like having no RAM just write it all on the SSD. If it was a good idea, probably every would be doing it.
I guess will be going back to Bear once the new version comes out.