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Saving your work

Three kinds of save (autosave, named local versions, and cloud source scenes), and when to reach for each.

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3dCMS has three ways to keep your work, and knowing the difference saves headaches. (See Core concepts for the short version.)

Autosave: always on

Every edit is silently written to your browser, and a refresh restores it. A "Saved Xs ago" pill near the menu bar shows recency. Autosave is tied to this browser, though, and the browser's storage tops out around 5 MB, so a scene with a heavy imported or generated model can outgrow it. When that happens, 3dCMS tells you to use Save As.

A crash can't lock you out Because the editor auto-restores your last scene on every visit, a scene heavy enough to crash the tab on load could otherwise leave you stuck. If 3dCMS detects that the previous load never finished, it parks that scene and offers a choice: Load my scene (try it once more) or Start without it (open fresh: your parked scene is moved safely into your saved list, never discarded, even when it was too big for normal autosave). So the editor always opens, even after a bad scene. If you later reopen that parked scene from your saved list, 3dCMS reminds you it's the one that failed to load before, and suggests a more powerful device or an immediate Save As to move it to your account.

Save As: a copy on your account

File ▸ Save As… stores your scene as an editable source scene on your account, with no size limit. Open it from any device via your Account page. Like Save As anywhere else, it always creates a new scene: the one you had open is left exactly as it was, published link and all. To update the open scene instead, use plain Save; to change its name without forking, use File ▸ Rename…. This is the durable home for anything you care about.

There's a ceiling of 200 saved scenes per account, far above ordinary use, and there purely so a runaway script can't fill the disk. Hit it and 3dCMS says so plainly ("delete one to make room") instead of failing the save mysteriously. The same cap covers scenes created through the MCP tools.

Renaming won't move a published link A scene's public URL is minted the first time you publish it and then stays put, so links you've already shared never break. Rename the scene all you like: republishing still updates the same address. If you truly want a different URL, use Save As… to make a new scene and publish that one (or take the old site down under Settings ▸ Sites first).

Saved versions: named local snapshots

Save (Ctrl+S) prompts for a version name and tucks a point-in-time snapshot into this browser. Handy for "before I try something drastic" checkpoints, though like autosave they are browser-local. It sits on the menu bar next to Publish, with a dot on it whenever you have unsaved changes, as well as in the File menu.

Anything that replaces your scene asks first Open… (from your account or from your device), New scene, Reset scene, and starting from a template all swap out what you have open and clear undo history. Each of them confirms first when there's unsaved work, so a mis-click can't quietly take a scene out of both undo and recovery at once. "Unsaved work" now includes work you did entirely with the mouse (a gizmo move, a vertex drag, a drag-extrude), which the guards used to wave straight through because nothing had been typed.
Two tabs, same scene? If you open the same scene in two tabs, 3dCMS won't let them silently clobber each other: it pauses background autosave and shows a Reload / Keep banner so you choose which version wins.

Version history: for template masters

If the scene you have open is a gallery template master (the scene other people's copies are made from), File ▸ Version history… appears in the menu. It lists checkpoints the server took automatically as you edited, newest first, with a Restore button on each. Restoring checkpoints your current scene first, so stepping back is itself undoable: reopen the dialog to step forward again. A burst of autosaves inside a couple of minutes records one checkpoint, no-op saves record none, and the newest 30 are kept.

What gets checkpointed is the server's last saved copy: that's all the server holds. So if you have unsaved edits open when you restore, the confirmation says so and offers Save changes, then restore beside Discard changes and restore: the save finishes first, then the restore lands, so the checkpoint is the work you actually did rather than a stale copy of it.

Ordinary scenes aren't versioned this way; for those, reach for Save As… and named snapshots.

The Object Library

Separately, you can save individual objects (not whole scenes) to a per-browser Object Library and drop them into any scene later, handy for a logo, a signature prop, a reusable arrangement.

Spotted something off, or want a topic covered? Email hello@3dcms.info.