I’d like to share an application with you that has saved my keester more than a couple of times. It’s called ForeverSave2 and is created by the Tool Software Force company.
What it Does
What it does, is auto-saves all of the documents that you are working on at an interval that you set and it’s all done in the background. Each time you save a document or a specified time interval has passed, ForeverSave 2 saves a new version of the document (you can set the maximum number of versions to create, if you so desire).
Lesson Learned the Hard Way
I find this app essential whenever I’m working on Microsoft Word documents because my experience has been that Word is extremely unstable. If I’m working on a long document for several hours, it’s bound to crash at least at least twice. Not long ago, Word crashed and when I tried to open the document, I was unable to do so – it was corrupted beyond repair. Luckily, I had a recent version (1 minute before) saved by ForeverSave 2 and I was back up and running.
Saves all kind of documents
What’s nice, is that ForeverSave works with many different document types: Word files, Excel files, Photoshop files, text files, iWork files, and more. You can add as many applications to the ForeverSave as you wish.
To save a application to Forever Save, click the + symbol on the lower left corner of the window. A list of all currently running applications are displayed. Simply click the app that you wish to add. To add an application that is not currently running, click Other and then navigate to the folder where the application is located.
But doesn’t OS X have Versioning?
Yes, OS X already includes versioning and I have taken advantage of it several times before I started using ForeverSave. One problem however, is that not all applications support OS X’s auto-save feature. At this time, Microsoft Office and Creative Cloud documents are still incompatible with Mac’s auto-save feature. While Microsoft Office does include an auto-save feature, my experience has shown that it is not to be depended upon.
Restoring a Document
To restore a document, click the document in the top window that you want to restore. All versions of the selected document are displayed in the window below. Double-click the version that you wish to restore. It will open in its own window.
You can also click and drag a document from the window to your desktop or to another folder.
Configuration Options
From the configuration box, you can set the interval for ForeverSave to save your documents. You can also choose from the following options:
- Ignore documents that are larger than a specified size
- Set the maximum number of versions to keep
- Erase backups after a specified number of days, weeks or months
- Ignore documents containing a specified string in the file name.

Verdict
I personally have found ForeverSave 2 to be an indispensable tool in my workflow, saving me potentially hours of time by NOT having to redo work lost in application crashes. I find the $19.95 price tag to be well worth it. If you have ever lost data because an application crashed, then ForeverSave 2 might be worth a look. They do offer a trial so you can test out the software before buying.
Their Website: http://tool-forcesw.com/foreversave/
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