There are several ways to save your work. You should save your work periodically to ensure that you can retrieve it if your computer crashes, or if some other unforeseen event shuts down VA Smalltalk.

To save work done in a Composition Editor, select Save Part from the File menu.

To save work to your IMAGE file, which holds your development environment and all parts that you add to it, select Save Image from the File menu of a VA Smalltalk editor or browser. (Or, when exiting VA Smalltalk, confirm that you want the image saved.)

Saving the image enables you to restart VA Smalltalk and get a development environment that is the same as when you last saved the image.

If you don't save your image and exit VA Smalltalk, when you restart VA Smalltalk, any work that you did after the last image-save won't be in the development environment. To restore work that you did after the last image-save, you'll have to load it from the library.

The Smalltalk User Guide describes what's in an image and explains how to restore your work.