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Alteryx Designer

Unbeknownst to many, by default Alteryx saves your open workflows every 10 minutes, keeps the last three iterations of them, and keeps them around for 30 days since the last save.

As you can imagine, many people are very happy to find this out when they frantically come to Support hoping for some way to resurrect a deleted or corrupted workflow. I have always found Alteryx to be an incredibly stable program, but it is nice knowing that my workflows will still be there in an unfortunate emergency, self-inflicted or otherwise.

From my experience, this is something that a lot of people either ignore or don't realize is there. What most people do realize is that for some reason, every one of their workflows has a similarly named copy, but with a .bak extension. The important thing to know is that when you least expect it, this file can become a lifesaver if something happens to your original workflow, so please don't delete them!

The old terminology Autosave used in earlier Alteryx version has now renamed to Autorecover.  However it may be loosely used in some community posts.

Open an Autorecovered Workflow

1. To open an autorecovered file, simply go to the menu File > Open Workflow > Open Autorecovered Files:

2. The following screen will open:

3. You simply click on the iteration of the workflow that you want to restore and then you have the choice of either opening that workflow or saving it to a directory. If you open the workflow directly from this screen, Alteryx will open up a temporary version of that workflow that you will need to save to an appropriate directory of your choosing.

Edit the Autorecover Defaults

1. To edit the Autorecover settings, go to Options > User Settings > Edit User Settings. You can find it in the General tab, scrolling down.
2. The Autorecover options are listed below. As you can see, you can adjust the interval in minutes that the workflow is saved, how many iterations of the workflow to save and how many days to keep the file.

• Autorecover Interval in Minutes: Type or click to set the time Alteryx waits before saving automatically saving a file. The default is 10.
• Autorecover per File: Type or click to set the number of times a file is saved before it is saved again as a new version. The default is 3.
• Days to Keep Autorecover Files: Type or click to set the number of days to keep autorecover file. The default is 30.

Note that you can also delete autorecovered files by selecting the file and then selecting the trash can icon on the top right of the popup box. Autorecovered files are saved in a different location than the original files (AppData\Local\Alteryx\Autosave). Verify this configuration before deleting an autorecovered file.

The Autorecover feature is very straightforward, while at the same time it can be the most important feature you ever used! Here is some more related information in our Help Docs .