Is there a notebook autosave frequency configuration?
You can set the NotebookAutoSave
preference programmatically or via the Option Inspector.
To turn autosave on by default for all notebooks, you could do:
CurrentValue[$FrontEnd, "NotebookAutoSave"] = True
You can also set the option for individual notebooks by changing $FrontEnd
to the appropriate notebook handle. According to the docs, NotebookAutoSave
saves after every evaluation and seems to be inflexible in that regard.
You could try executing
RunScheduledTask[
EmitSound[Sound[SoundNote[]]];NotebookSave[EvaluationNotebook[]], 10];
which saves the notebook every 10 seconds and plays a note.
I have a Mathematica package that provides auto-backup functionality. When enabled, the current notebook--call it "blah.nb"--will be backed up to "blah.nb~" after a configurable amount of time has elapsed. I use it constantly and it has saved me from losing work many, many times. It's better than autosaving since it doesn't touch the actual notebook file: if you screw something up or something gets corrupted you don't want to overwrite your main file. :)
It's on GitHub here.