Protection Mode is an old safe guard feature implemented years ago that is disabled by default and should stay like that. Since this option saves your data more often then not, it will cause delay as you have seen and larger your project data gets longer are the saves.
@eddiead be very careful about the output of AI technologies! I have seen many wrong things writen is a very nice way! Always refer to the online help for details: Help
We might discuss to see if removing this legacy option is a good idea since it causes more headaches than helps.
Please keep us updated on your findings but you should be good to go.
@Slabrie
‘Protect Mode’ was most definitely active by default from the 2026 install (for me at least). I had to disable this as per suggestion from @johnag
As for the AI output: I expressed this as an explicit caveat and requested confirmation of this information from a wider knowledge base as yourself and never accepted the output as defacto factual truth as all AI output should be thoroughly fact checked by default.
The current information available on this feature seems very sparse from the ADSK documentation and the hope was a better clarification from the dev side of this implementation which you did touch on briefly in your response.
Thank you for your input in this matter and I’m hoping that this will solve some problems for other users as well.
I’m currently still testing.
The problem does not seem to be completely resolved though.
Startup times vary massively. After disabling ‘protection mode’ there has been a marked improvement.
Initial restart was good (60sec). I’ve been working, saved and exit Flame. Restart Flame as a test and load time of the project is 35mins.
Exit Flame, start the project again, load time (5mins).
Exit Flame start a different fresh project, startup time (several seconds) as there is no media or setups to load.
Relaunch my current large project again, loading Workspace (10mins) getting stuck at ‘Batch FX: creating node connections’ (for the next 11mins).
Total load time 21:55mins
Exit Flame relaunch this same project and load time 01:31mins
There seems to be some ‘cached’/loaded data that is flushed (this is spit balling and not using the correct terminology) when switching between different projects and then larger projects need to reload large chunks of data again? or this might be isolated to this specific problematic project. It is difficult to say as I don’t have anything to compare too.
Something is afoot though.
I will keep testing and report back as new information comes to light.
PS Edit: When I’m in the project - working, rendering and saving is responsive as per normal expectations (after disabling ‘Protection Mode’)
Thanks for the update. I would strongly recommend to provide all this data to our Support team. It will be easier to follow-up and ensure we do not duplicate efforts on the investigation. I could also be helpful to share an archive of your project so they can see the nature of the content.
You might also want to have a look at these other preferences and try to disable them if they are enabled:
thank you for the feedback.
I’m currently not using history on any rendered media and I will disable ‘Save Backup on Exit’ for Batch & BFX.
The support team seems to have set the ticket to ‘solved’ on the back of monitoring the flow of this thread.
I will supply all information to the support team as requested.
The current archive of the project in question is 1.49TB, bar that this is an international spot that has not been delivered yet. I will need to request permission from client side to share the media after I have managed to deliver the spot.
Performance remains inconsistent.
Archiving from 2026.1 is not compatible with 2026.2. In the process of running another archive from 2026.2, the saving of the Workspace shot up to 08:16mins again. So things seems to be changing all the time without being able to pin point the obvious variables.
I’ll keep collecting data in a desperate attempt to deliver this job.
After that the sensible way forward seems to revert back to 2025 it seems.
No worry, we can investigate the issue without the archive.
If you could compress the catalog folder located in the project home as a zip file and provide the zip to our Support team that would help the invstigation.
Where is located the project home? local disk? Network? NAS?
Your flame 2025 solution is the best solution for your problem.
Apprently nobody knows what is causing your productivity diminishment, as evidenced by the custom solutions that adsk have provided for you, and the fact that we know that those solutions have not worked.
One of the main differences between how you (Instinctual) work and us mortals among us is that you use project server.
I only know of only a few places that ever tried a project server workflow:
one: very small, didn’t work, gave up
two: you, made it look like swan lake, ran into 2026 troubles
three: big company with lots of engineering and software development (including the guy who may or may not have invented project server) and they use it very very successfully, every day, but never talk about it
The support case was not closed at all. We were waiting for your answer for the confirmation after your post in this thread “For now it is a solve as a single seat user”.
Please, provide the same information in the support case as provided in here in order not to have this kind of confussions. We had a whole day with no answers in the case thread.
Thanks a lot all for helping us narrow down the issue.
There could be many reasons loading and writing project data could take time:
-Size of the data (i.e. some matchboxes are quite large and as an example crok_renoise.mx contains a 12MB texture! So if you massively use this matchbox or others large ones then you will have large libraries.
-Location of the project home: before 2026, it was only possible to create project data on the system drive, which is very fast by definition. Now that you can created projects anywhere, the location and its speed are very important. Also, for macOS users, make sure to disable Spotlight for project home and media cache. The indexing of files could have a huge impact as listed here: Help
Please contact our Support team for any issue of this type since exchaning messages here is far for optimized.
Thank you for this feedback.
I moved to macOS from a Linux Flame only three years ago. The MacStudio has served me extremely well and my workflow has not changed since the introduction of timeline BFX.
The current issues experienced only surfaced after the upgrade to 2026.
I will monitor complete fresh projects in 2026.2 and report back if the issues persists.
So I’ve been living with the slow saves on a huge project. I have two more episodes to do to finish this year long project - about 4 hours of material - and I’m down to the last ten minutes.
2026.2 seems to be even slower, or maybe the project has just gotten too big… Regardless - for these last two, I’m considering making a new project from scratch. But I’d like advice on what is the best way to use the new database and project structure?
I have a single Mac workstation, with a 60TB external drive configured as RAID5.
For this single user setup, what is the best practice for where to set the project and setups path? Obviously media will go to the raid - but should projects and setups be set to the boot drive?
