Has there been a way figured out yet to save custom projects on Glowforge. This would help out a great deal.
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The new Autosave function does it automatically for every file now. Is that what you were wanting to do?
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the autosave does, in its own way. it automatically saves the file set up as you left it the last time you were in the file. so if you move or delete something, they stay moved or deleted.
if it’s your uploaded file, you can’t reset inside the GFUI, but you can re-upload.
if it’s a catalog file, you can reset to original inside the GFUI.
but there’s no place to hit “save” and permanently save a copy with a specific set up and specific settings.
so it’s useful, for sure, but not necessarily intuitive to how most people work.
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The “Save As” (name) option has been suggested to them. They might consider it, but no way of knowing if it will make the cut. 
totally understand and get that. i just think we need to point out exactly what autosave is and how it works, since people are probably expecting to be able to do a “save” like they do in any design program.
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The direction web and mobile app development is moving is toward one of continuity of experience over explicit saves. In the Mobile First world, people often work in short snippets and frequently change focus, shifting between apps. When they return to an app, they expect it to be as they left it, even if the app has been kicked out of memory.
What is missing in many such apps is an ability to explicitly save the current state as something to come back to. Some apps have an ability to rewind to any prior point—kind of a persistent Undo.
This goes very much against the usage patterns many of us are used to.
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it does, but i would argue there is room for both. and this is particularly true in the design world. there’s a reason designers have 17 versions of the same design saved all with the word “final” as part of the file name. 
maybe if there were “snapshots” that we could create as you work. but in the end, you need to have a state to restore to. a baseline design. this works fine with the catalog designs. but uploading your own design means your restore is to delete what you have and upload again. kind of a pain.
Yes. I absolutely agree and this is something that many in the industry are trying to figure out as new ways of doing things.
A single timeline with snapshots is a good, but simplistic approach. But in practice we may need multidimensional branching. And when you have more than one person working on a project (not necessarily a problem for many on a Glowforge) things can get more complicated.
Add to that the tendency for people to reinvent the wheel while creating new technologies… (insert curmudgeon rant of your choice 
).
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if you figure out a new way, let me know!
for now, versioning in file names is how most electronic visual design is done. for my GF process, my source file usually stays the same (unless i heavily branch off and want to save off an iteration). i’m able to use layers that i can turn on and off or multiple artboards to deal with variations. my “snapshot” versions tend to be the PDFs that i export to upload to test.
Ain’t that the truth 
“_Final” is now just a preface to a version # 
at work, our file naming structure accounts for it.
XXXXX_Cvr_0118_D1xxx_FP
job#_Filetype_MoYr_Draft#initials
then FP for final print or FE for final electronic.
so if you end up with:
12345_Cvr_0118_D12gbw_FP
and there’s an update, you just save:
12345_Cvr_0118_D13gbw_FP.
I would do draft versions (v1, v2, v3…) then a “v4_Final” until I started doing Final, Really Final, Definitely the last time Final…so now I just rely on the version number. The highest one is the last one I did.
Sometimes I split off an interim version and then that gets a new descriptive name so I know why it’s different (like one is vector based and the other raster).
We all have the same problem and have to find a solution that works for us. I just found that I had way more “Final” versions than I should if they were really final 
Corel does some nice auto-versioning and then has a Revert function as well if you want to go back up through versions. Inkscapers don’t have that though 
I finally gave up on that and use the most recent version created. (Time-wise, I tend to quit when I finally get it right.)
But I’ve been through the “Absolutely positively final most version dammit”-V4. It doesn’t count without the “dammit” on it.
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I always preface file names with dates such as “2018-01-17…” so that I can sort alphabetically to get the latest.
search “Load and Save Settings” in beyond the manual.
The CAD industry has come up with a solution to this called PDM (Product Data Management). Basically it is a system, usually managed by an application and dedicated file server separate from the CAD software, that automatically maintains versioning every time a user saves a file, such as AutoDESK VAULT. (Yes, you can conceivably have files with tens or hundreds of versions this way) They handle multiple users by having a checkout process, where a user checks out a file for updating and nobody has access to that file until it is checked back in. To simplify things, only the most recent version of any file is immediately/easily accessible via the PDM application, however all previous versions of the file are still available through another method that takes just a few more steps, as part of the version control.
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The Glowforge app is really optimized to be the final stage in a process that mostly takes place in your design software - Illustrator, Inkscape, Fusion 360, etc. Personally, I do all my versioning there, and spend just a few minutes in the Glowforge UI adjusting the layout to the material.
We’ve heard loud and clear that people would like more flexibility in our app, though, so there’s a lot of work in the hopper.
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Being able to save a version back as a (somewhat maimed, and free of proprietary info) to the hard drive would save a lot of space in your own servers?