I noticed that it's behaving weird, I have set it up to autosave every 5 minutes and that it can make 50 variations of the project and yet Premiere will autosave for a few times and then I'll continue to edit for hours without a single new autosave.

I noticed this because I had a crash due to power failure and I was thinking to myself, no problem, I lost 5 minutes of work. Boy was I surprised to find out that I actually lost about 4 hours of work. Before anyone chimes in, I know I should have saved more often but Premiere has been rock stable for me and I was saved by autosave before so it's really no big deal, when it works!

And this behavior is definitely repeatable, I set up a new project and started to monitor how autosave works, again it saved a few times and then nothing. Even when I let it sit for an hour doing nothing but occasional nudge of a clip on the timeline, I don't get any new autosaves.

Can anyone else test and confirm this behavior?

Premiere recycles the file names for the auto-save files. This means that when it needs to re-use the oldest of the existing names, the original file is over-written and retains the same name. The default display in Windows shows the new file as having been created at the old time since it has the same name.

Alter the displays of file details to show "Date Modified" rather than "Date Created" and you should find that it is actually performing the autosave.

I know that Alan, and that's how it worked until cs5.5

I did set it to have 50 iterations but I only had four saves in the autosave folder and the last one was modified 4 hours before the power failure.

And apparently there's no rule, I'm working on a new project right now and after two hours of work there are 43 saves in the autosave folder.

I'm puzzled...