The below excerpt is from the article “All about AutoSave in Lotus Notes/Domino 7” on Lotus Developer Domain:
Only documents created from forms with Allow AutoSave selected can be autosaved. This is the only way to ensure that the document can be recovered after it has been autosaved. Many Notes/Domino applications have code in their Save and Post Save events that create items, or perform validations that are checked at load time. Because we can’t execute these events while autosaving the document, none of this will take place, and the autosaved document will be in a “bad” state. This could lead to failing to load the document after recovery.
If your application does write items on save events, and its dependant upon these item, you may need to add code in your Query Open event to put defaults for those items. You can even do special handling only for documents that are recovered by looking for an item called $AutoSaveRecovered. This item will only be available for recovered documents up until the Post Open event, and will be deleted after that.
Another way to programmatically disable AutoSave on individual documents is by adding the item $DontAutosave. This item prevents AutoSave on that document. If you remove $DontAutosave, the document can again be autosaved.
NOTE: In Notes/Domino 7.0, the only shipping template form that is enabled for AutoSave is the Memo form.
Nice to know that fields has been added to detect whether a document is being recovered via AutoSave.