Since the stability of some Delphi IDE versions leave something to desire, people have asked for an autosave feature for a long time.
Delphi 2010 eventually got “Save on compile” while older versions only had “Save on run”.
Ray Lischner originally wrote an AutoSave wizard for Delphi 5 (if I remember correctly) and ported it to Delphi 6 and 7 later. I have taken his code, extended it and ported it to all later Delphi versions.
The wizard does the following:
Whenever triggered it checks for files that have not been saved yet. It saves these files as ~filename.ext. When the file is saved, it deletes these ~files again. In the event of the IDE crashing, it will on restart ask the user whether he wants to load the regular file or the last autosave file.
The wizard can be configured to trigger
- every x minutes
- whenever the IDE “compiles”
I recommend to activate the latter setting. You will be surprised how often the IDE “compiles” stuff.
There are no precompiled packages. Just get the sources, open the package that corresponds to your Delphi version, compile and install it.
You can find the current sources on the dzAutoSave page on sourceforge.