Hi Matt -

Thanks for responding.

I appreciate your suggestions but, under Tools, Options, General, about mid-way down, the user chooses how often ProSeries is supposed to save to Automatic Recovery.  I chose 2 minutes.  I've had it set in the past to as much as 10 minutes but set it to 2 last year on the advice of a tech support person at ProSeries.

There are no duplicate files, and no wonky paths.  Yes, I have saved successfully.  There's no rhyme or reason to this failure as far as I can see.

I've used ProSeries tax software since the late 80s and last year is the first time this has happened to me.  Last year it happened on business returns, and this year, so far, it's on a 1040.  I think something's up on the ProSeries end. There were a lot of changes and upgrades to the software between tax year 2018 and 2019.  Many of us needed to upgrade our equipment to accommodate those changes.

I work out of my home and there's not really an end of day for me.  Things happen and I'm away from the desk unexpectedly fairly frequently.  I might start work at the crack of dawn, or work until after midnight.  I agree that intentional saving of the file manually is a way to avoid this, but I shouldn't have to.  The software is set up to do it for me every 2 minutes, and if something more drastic happens, at next opening the software is supposed to, and has always, offered me a choice to either recover or discard a file that was closed unexpectedly.  My email saves to draft every few minutes.  Microsoft Office auto-saves documents seamlessly, as does every other good quality software package that I can think of.  

I see that you're an employee.  Do you think I'm the only customer who has reported this happening, either this year or last?  Can you put me in touch with someone who might be familiar with this bug?  Or look it up?  Or refer to my call last year about this same issue?  

Thank you.