DAWs are notorious for crashing. They must handle multiple instances of high-performance signal processing plugins, and sample libraries can consume your free RAM which may cause your DAW to stop responding. This article looks at Cockos Reaper’s autosave feature, and how to enable it.

This is a very important topic to cover, as far too many a time, your DAW will crash. Reaper is arguably one of the better DAWs for stability, but this doesn’t mean people don’t lose work because it has crashed before they hit save.

Of course, nothing beats standard good computer practice saving as you go, but as a producer, you will find yourself suddenly immersed and often saving the project will be at the back of your mind.

Before you read any further, if the following is news to you, I highly recommend you spend half an hour looking through each tab in Reaper’s project settings. There are so many features which you could find helpful, that you probably didn’t even know were there.



Autosaving in Reaper

While Reaper has many great features enabled from startup, strangely, it’s not a default setting. So, I am going to show you all how to activate it.

First of all select options, and scroll down to preferences.

If you go to project, you get the page below. This allows you to select autosave features. MAKE SURE TO CLICK APPLY AND THEN OK. I set the autosave time to every 5 minutes however you can set it to however long or short you like. I also set it to only save when not recording – I would hate to be recording and have it interrupted somehow by a save. The rest is up to you on how you save it and to where.

If you set it to autosave very regularly, bear in mind that it is creating a new save each time (e.g every minute), this will take up your storage space on the computer.

I have my autosaves set to save onto my external 4tb hard drive, which means I can clean out all the old autosaves much more infrequently without it taking up needed space.

A final thing to remember: this autosave feature requires one thing. It requires the project to have an initial save name and location.

Basically, Reaper can allow you to start a new project without saving it anywhere. If you decide to do this, there is nowhere for it to autosave to and so your project will be lost. If you are in the habit of opening new projects without a title and save location, don’t worry, you can set it up to prompt you at each project start.