"Well this is potentially embarrassing! It appears that the last time you were editing the file %s it was not saved properly. Do you wish to restore the last saved edits you made?
No / Yes"
I’m not sure if this is clear.
It tells me that it wasn’t saved, so if I Yes “restore the last saved edits” that means loading the file with none of my changes since it’s talking about the last time I saved the file?
But I think that’s not what it does. I think it means Yes load autosave although it doesn’t indicate that there is an autosave it just says there’s no proper save.
I don’t recall seeing that dialog. If I saw it, I would be uncertain about the consequences of the action I chose. (I should add that I don’t understand the dialog regarding “rescued” components, either.)
KiCAD is developed and maintained by an international group of people. For many (perhaps most) of them, English is NOT their first language. Words, phrases, and composition that seems unclear or ambiguous in English was probably quite clear in a developer’s original language. There is some insightful discussion on this topic in the thread, “Non-devs: What do you think of the app names?”
In the sacred writings of the Hebrews and Christians there is a story about a time when all people spoke the same language. The engineers were having a grand time building cities and roads and generally working together to improve daily life. Then managers showed up and decided everybody should work on a colossal project that would even out-do what God had done. As you can imagine, God was not pleased by this so God made people start to speak different languages . . . . and technical communication has had problems ever since.
If I was in your position I would use the file browser and go to the folder and pull a backup of it’s current content, as it talks about files and it’s edits not being properly saved.
If push comes to shove, with the backups, you should (upon loading) come to this very same juncture again.
But yeah, it does sound confused to me as well (German background here).
That dialog is triggered just by the presence of an autosave file. Normally the autosave file is deleted on exit, so the assumption is that if the autosave file exists, something must have gone wrong. There is no check on whether the main file is valid or has an earlier timestamp than the autosave.
Saying yes to the dialog copies the main file to the backup, and the autosave file to the main file. So if the autosave was the wrong version, you should still have the backup, but the backup is lost.
Personally I do a diff on the autosave, the main file and the backup (and maybe against git) outside of KiCad to see if I have lost or gained any unexpected changes.