Quote Originally Posted by dennisvz View Post
One last question. Does autosaving interfere with anything else going on within the program, like if the program is running some loop, or whether the user is in the process of entering data in the UI or whether the user just manually clicked the same "Save" button?
In a straightforward single-threaded Qt program the timer will go off, and the auto-save called, only when the program returns to the Qt event loop. If your program is busy doing some processing that does not return to the event loop, e.g. a 5 minute computation, then it will not be interrupted. While the save is occurring the program not be doing anything else, which can be a problem if that takes a long time.

You probably also need to be defensive and auto-save to somewhere other than the real file, and only overwrite the real file if the user selects Save deliberately. On file open look for the matching auto-save and, if found (because the program crashed last time), offer to use that instead. Depends on your application though.