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Saving Files

Description

Saving files is like loading files. When you press F2, the window underneath the mouse pointer temporarily changes into a File Browser, as shown in (File Browser window – saving).

Options

Click the lower edit box to enter a filename. If it doesn’t end with “.blend”, the extension is automatically appended. Then press ↵ Enter or click the Save File button to save the file.

If a file with the same name already exists, you will have to confirm that you want to overwrite it in the Save Over pop-up dialogue.

Depending on the number of save versions you have set, all existing files with the same name will be rotated to a .blendn file extension, where n is 1, 2, 3, etc. So, if you were working on MyWork.blend, and saved it, the existing MyWork.blend is renamed to MyWork.blend1, and a new MyWork.blend is saved. This way, you have hot backups of old saved versions that you can open if you need to massively undo changes.

Compress Files

Enable File » Compress File to squash large files, removing dead space.

Hint

The save dialog contains a little feature to help you to create multiple versions of your work: pressing + NumPad or - NumPad increments or decrements a number at the end of the file name. To simply save over the currently loaded file and skip the save dialog, press CtrlW instead of F2 and just confirm at the prompt.