Crash recovery

How Beam Bench recovers an in-progress project after an unclean exit. Where the autosave lives and how to restore it.

You see

The app crashed, the machine was killed mid-edit, or the OS force-quit Beam Bench. On next launch, the Recovery dialog appears with one or more recoverable projects listed.

Alternatively, the dialog does not appear and you are wondering whether your unsaved work survived.

When Autosave is enabled (default), Beam Bench writes a backup copy of your project at a fixed interval. If the app exits uncleanly, the autosave file remains. On next launch, Beam Bench checks for autosave files and offers them via the Recovery dialog.

How recovery works

Per-row buttons in the Recovery dialog

For each recoverable project:

Restore: open this project from its autosave.
Discard: delete this single recovery file. The original .lzrproj on disk (if any) is not touched.

Global

Discard All: delete every recovery file shown.
Close: leave files in place. The dialog will appear again next launch.

After Restore, the project loads in the app with the recovered content. It is not saved yet: save explicitly (Ctrl+S) to commit the recovered state to the project file.

Where the autosave lives

App-managed files (preferences, autosave, the art library on first run) are at:

macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Beam Bench/
Windows: %AppData%\Beam Bench\
Linux: ~/.config/Beam Bench/

Recovery files are written under the app-data directory as <project-id>.lzrproj.recovery, one per project being recovered. The exact path may differ by build.

If the Recovery dialog does not appear

Causes:

Autosave is disabled in Settings → General.
The autosave file is missing or corrupt (rare but possible after a hard crash mid-write).
The project was never autosaved (e.g. the crash happened within seconds of starting).

If autosave was disabled, you have no recovery. Enable it for next time.

Reducing the autosave interval

The default interval is reasonable. For lengthy projects with many edits, reduce the interval in Settings → General. For projects with few edits, the default is fine.

Avoiding crashes in the first place

Keep Beam Bench updated.
Send feedback reports when crashes happen (Send Feedback dialog) so I can fix the root cause.
If a specific operation reliably crashes, share the reproduction in the Facebook group.