Blender Auto Save Timer Limits During Playback and Long Renders

What Auto Save guarantees

Blender's Auto Save, present since 2.80 and active in current releases, writes a timed copy of the working scene to the system's temporary directory. The interval is configured in Preferences under Save & Load, and File > Recover > Auto Save exposes the last write after a crash. What the feature does not document is how the timer behaves while the interface is busy.

The playback boundary

During animation playback or timeline scrubbing, the interface stays busy with frame evaluation. It is unclear whether a pending Auto Save write pauses, defers until playback stops, or is skipped for that interval entirely. The same ambiguity applies to long-running operations such as a render or an active transform, where event processing is limited. No preference or release note states when such a pause takes effect, and the preferences expose no record of deferred or skipped intervals.

Version assumption: Blender 2.80 and later; the timer interaction should be confirmed on the specific release in use.

• Does the Auto Save timer pause during playback, or does the pending write execute once playback stops?
• Is the pause boundary the current frame, the playback session, or the next idle pass of the event loop?
• Do long-running operations such as rendering produce the same deferral as playback?