Blender’s save feature is so convenient that I’ve gotten into the habit of saving every couple of minutes (or seconds, as the case may be). This is an okay habit, since Blender won’t complain at all if you quit without saving changes, but I’ve had more than one instance where I was experimenting with a file and saved over it when I didn’t want to.
For the longest time, this simply meant going back and doing hard work to undo whatever experiment I was trying. I recently got fed up with this and changed one simple option in Blender to fix it.
You’ve probably noticed that Blender saves a .blend1 file along with your .blend file. This is a backup of the previous version of that file. Theoretically, this would solve my problem since I could just go back to the last version of that file and continue. My absent-minded saving is persistant, though, and I’ve saved over the .blend1’s of multiple files.
Luckily, Blender anticipates people like me, and includes an option in the User Preferences pane. Just go to the “auto save” tab and increase the number of “Save Versions” (found on the left side of that pane). This will create more backups, such as .blend2, .blend3, etc.
Problem solved!
