It would be nice to have the option to turn off autosave.
Sometimes, one plays around with different configurations and workflow changes. Before autosave, that was no problem. If you did not save a workflow, nothing was modified.
Nowadays, it is sometimes the case that it is hard to find the version in the workflow history, where a workflow was in a good state - sometimes 100+ versions in the workflow history.
Also for collaboration or learning by checking workflows of others this caused problems in our team, as workflows were accidentally modified and those changes published afterwards.
For some users, the autosave feature was helpful. Others also requested a turn-off. Maybe this could become a configuration/setting for a n8n project or a n8n instance/account.
Very much agree. I see the value, but an option to turn on/off would be great. Sometimes I want to test something and I donât actually want to commit.
Like with github, you say when to save it so you can have stable versions and go back when you need. Autosaving every change you make would create quite the mess when changes are still being debugged/tested.
Hey @BradleyHubbard thanks a lot for the feedback, very much appreciated. Iâm curious: If you have a stable version, wouldnât you want to publish that one?
Reasons to provide the option to disable auto-save at the WORKFLOW level:
Making some experimental changes to a Workflow on a Friday, coming to work on a Monday and being unable to return to the previous original state (as the history exceeded 24 hours).
When making layout changes, the browser often hangs or has issues because it is saving every micro movement. For some tasks, like re-organizing a layout, I want to temporarily disable auto-save.
[Self Hosted, Safari] When combining multiple workflows together on a canvas, auto-save can cause the browser tab to completely fail when trying to open properties of items that lookup other items (like sub workflows).
Please just add the ability to turn it off at the workflow level so that this remains a feature for everyone and not a burden/bug for some.
Hey @umnz, thanks so much for coming back to me. Let me go over your points one by one to understand them better:
If I understand correctly that also wouldnât be possible without auto-save? When you saved something on Friday, and you come back on a Monday, youâd still not have the version before, wouldnât you? Or would just just keep the tab open unsaved?
This is interesting. Normally, it should not auto-save every little change, and it especially should be a resource heavy operation that hangs your browser. Is this happening on really big workflows for you?
Can you help me to understand that more? Theoretically you should always see the most current version of things like sub-workflows.
Iâm running a self-hosted instance with many active workflows and heavy automation. Autosave creates serious practical problems:
Version history bloat â history fills up with hundreds of meaningless intermediate saves, making it nearly impossible to find a stable version to roll back to.
Browser performance â on large workflows, constant saving every 2 seconds causes noticeable lag and hangs, especially when reorganizing the canvas layout.
Cognitive overhead â I can no longer quickly experiment with changes knowing I can just close the tab. Every âexploratory editâ is now permanently recorded.
The Publish/Draft separation is a great improvement, but it doesnât solve the autosave problem â it just moves the risk from âaccidental deployâ to âcluttered history + browser lag.â
A simple per-instance environment variable (N8N_WORKFLOWS_AUTOSAVE_DISABLED) or a per-workflow toggle would satisfy both camps. Thereâs already a community PR (#25144) proposing exactly this.
Iâd like to also request the option to disable this.
Iâve implemented some Hooks on Save/Publish, and now Iâm buried in evaluations and notifications. Even things like moving a node a pixel. I really do want to be able to select Full Manual Save option, accepting that the user is responsible for lost work.
If we want to meet in the middle, perhaps the auto-saves can be a fork version that can be presented when I return to a workflow if I hadnât saved. So: Make edits, each (debounced hopefully) is saved to fork, reload page/computer reboots/whatever, and there is a banner that says âYou have unsaved changes from a prior sessionâ but show me the last manual saved state and allow me to preview the changes auto-saved.
I didnât want to wait, so I just generated my own temp solution. This should work pretty simply⌠but may not cover all cases. Just figured weâd share our solution as a starting point.
Totally agree The autosave makes reverting to previous states much more difficult. When Iâm testing minor configuration changes to see what works, the feature saves every iteration automatically. This makes things worse when I need to get back to the original working state. We need a manual save toggle or better version control during active editing.