Hi Dave,
Sorry for the delay in replying. I have been away from the Internet this weekend but since it is Father's Day, I am allowed a few moments today, LOL.
Auto-Save has been a standard feature in Apex since the DOS days, so it should be there in your Apex Medina. if it is not working, we need to find out why. Maybe the option is turned off or simply not functioning correctly (?) - maybe it is not working through integration (?), etc... Check out the items below and if these do not solve the problem, give us a call on Monday and we'll get it straightened out for you. If you do need to call in to tech support, we'll want to know your Apex version and date shown by selecting "About" under the Help menu. We'll also want to know if you are experiencing this issue when running in "stand-alone mode" and/or in "integrated mode." If it is while integrated, we'll want to know what program you are "launching" Apex from and it's version/date info just in case we know something about that particular combo, etc. That said, I am not aware of any reason you should not have Auto-Save options available to you. In fact, it should be "on" by default...
The Auto-Save function is "triggered" by a couple of settings in the configuration dialog tabs. It writes a back-up sketch file to a user-selectable location according to how the option is set under the Tools | Configuration | Misc. tab - see image below. The choices are:
<Never> - Auto-Save is "turned off"
Area - Auto-Saves every time a Defined Area is closed
Event - Auto-Saves after every significant "event" - i.e. when you press [Enter], like placing text, dimension(s), Symbols, draw a single line, etc.
Because Apex files are so small (usually only a few KB in size), the Auto-Save is generally virtually instantaneous and not something that is distracting while drawing. of course, the user need "write" permissions to the specified location ("local" or "network", etc.) but this isn't generally an issue.
The default location for the Auto-Save(ed) file is found on the next tab - Tools | Configuration | Defaults - see other image below. The small [...] button at the end of the location field allows you to browse to any desired location.
All this said, the long-standing behavior of Auto-Save in Apex is to write the file to the specified location at the set interval. This file is kept "on disk" until the user exits the program normally. If you exit normally, the back-up file is deleted since you would have successfully saved the regular file to disk, or specifically elected not to save it. If the machine locks up, you lose power, ow whatever and run Apex again, upon start-up, it looks for the back-up file and asks if you want to load it up. From what you describe, it appears that Apex is exiting normally so it is not saving the back-up file, or the option is not set. Anyway, check this out and if you cannot get it handled yourself, give us a call tomorrow and we'll straighten it out.
Hope this helps!
-Randall Garrett-
..Apex Software..