I'm not a developer, just an ardent fan of the work that the guys at AstuteGraphics do to improve the functionality of Illustrator.

One of their products they introduced before Illustrator had recovery capabilities was a plugin called Autosaviour. It's a tool that can not only regularly save your files at a given interval but also create backup copies of them too.

I recently asked the team if it was possible to adjust the way backups get created by utilising the 'Save a copy' function so that the original file could remain intact whilst in the background periodic backups could be created. I was disappointed to find that it is not possible for them to do this.

Please make it possible for developers to call the save a copy function within their plugins and scripts.