Blender is saving as a blend1 file, not blend I teach Blender to classes of game design students in the University of California and a student came to me yesterday with a problem I haven't seen before. She's created a very simple file, but when it's saved Blender puts a .blend1 extension on it every time, not the normal .blend. This means that after it's saved twice there are two .blend1 files in the directory, and no .blend file. I have no idea why this is happening. What has she done? Anyone seen this before?

thanks - Chris
That's Blender's file versioning system. A very subtle but quite helpful feature. When you open the settings panel, under File, you can specify how many previous versions of a file you want to keep around on your computer. 

So everytime you hit save, Blender maintains a stack of previous versions of the same file so you have some backup of your work and don't overwrite your progress when saving.



In the above screenshot, the last 5 versions of one .blend file are saved. All suffixed individually (.blend1, .blend2 and so on). 

You can enable showing file versions in the open file dialog if you want to pick a specific version from your save history (red arrow). And also you can toggle showing normal .blend files in that dialog (green arrow) which is what your student probably did.



Hope this helps!