Lost drawing / Autosave

I think when someone passes themselves off as an authority figure, teacher in this case, and gives, IMHO, bad advice.....

My advice is based on years (and personal experience) of people coming to me wanting to know how to retrieve hours of work that they did not take the responsibility of saving. Once they take on this responsibility - no further substantial work is lost.

Hmmm, remember the recent plane crash in San Francisco? I thought the autopilot ......

Bottom line - the work is gone and will need to be recreated.

I think when someone passes themselves off as an authority figure, teacher in this case, and gives, IMHO, bad advice. It needs to be pointed out that the advice given may be undesirable.

While I don't really agree with the notion of turning AutoSave off, I don't consider it to be "bad advice". It merely forces beginners to understand and get in the habit of saving their work manually instead of allowing them to think that the program will do it for them. I think AutoSave should be named something different because it does NOT do what you think it does. It does NOT save your work for you. If you work for 3 hours, without saving, and then close, without saving, your work is gone. AutoSave is only a backup feature in case of a crash. It should be called CrashSave or something more descriptive like that.

While I don't really agree with the notion of turning AutoSave off, ....

Many of the CAD programs we use (Autodesk Inventor being one) do not even have an "AutoSave".

I guess that eliminates that program from consideration for anyone who "relies" on autosave ....

I mainly rely on my brain to remember (haven't saved in a while) and my left hand to execute the proper command sequence (two finger salute). LoL

I just hit the qs keys and enter every bit, just in case.

I think AutoSave should be named something different because it does NOT do what you think it does.

I *think* some people get confused also because 'autosave' in other programs like MSWord *do/can* write to the current file.

Does Microstation still do this too?

While I don't really agree with the notion of turning AutoSave off, I don't consider it to be "bad advice". It merely forces beginners to understand and get in the habit of saving their work manually instead of allowing them to think that the program will do it for them. I think AutoSave should be named something different because it does NOT do what you think it does. It does NOT save your work for you. If you work for 3 hours, without saving, and then close, without saving, your work is gone. AutoSave is only a backup feature in case of a crash. It should be called CrashSave or something more descriptive like that.

I agree with everything except for the "bad advice" part. On more than one occasion, I have had situations where I had done something that I did want to do again and AutoCAD has crashed, especially in my early years. Knowing that AutoSave was there for just such an occasion saved a little unnecessary fist pounding. I was taught to not rely on it to save my work, not to turn it off.

Keep autosave set to ON, yeah it makes heaps of BAK file in our temp directory so every now and then just do a massive delete. As I said earlier it does not seem to save every 10 mins but it would have saved a lot compared to 3 hrs work. My pet beef with guys here is save before going to a meeting or lunch etc if we have a power outage all work is gone.

Like others GET IN HABIT OF SAVING NOW AND THEN

A actual true example a few minutes ago Autocad spat it and closed no idea why, I lost about 5 minutes as I was saving as I made changes to a DWG each time I changed layouts.

Keep autosave set to ON, yeah it makes heaps of BAK file in our temp directory so every now and then just do a massive delete.

Autosave doesn't create .bak files, it creates .sv$ files which are deleted when Autocad closes normally. They should not be piling up and cluttering your temp folder unless Autocad is constantly crashing?

I find this thread very interesting because I lost a complete drawing last week after just shutting down Autocad (didn't get an error or the "do you want to save" dialog)

Does Microstation still do this too?

Yes it does.

In my opinion autodesk could learn a lot from Bentley and the saving is one of those things. (I'm going to start about all the other tihngs)

Microstation writes directly to the file so everything is saved immediatly and you have to do your very best to lose your data.

Yes it does.

In my opinion autodesk could learn a lot from Bentley and the saving is one of those things. (I'm going to start about all the other tihngs)

Microstation writes directly to the file so everything is saved immediatly and you have to do your very best to lose your data.

I do not like that at all.

I open drawing files all day long that I do not wish to save. (Yes, I know I should open them 'read-only'....)

I wouldn't want a pan, zoom, or other minor edit being written to the file and updating the last saved date.

Autosave doesn't create .bak files, it creates .sv$ files which are deleted when Autocad closes normally. They should not be piling up and cluttering your temp folder unless Autocad is constantly crashing?

True.

I wrote a tidbit on autosave a while back, I guess now is as good as anytime to point to it for further reading....

I do not like that at all.

I open drawing files all day long that I do not wish to save. (Yes, I know I should open them 'read-only'....)

I wouldn't want a pan, zoom, or other minor edit being written to the file and updating the last saved date.

It's true that sometimes it's annoying for Microstation to save everything and change the date of the file all the time but that's why you can select in the "open file" dialog to open it read-only.

Also, panning, zooming, and other view changes aren't saved in the "undo list" but have their own previous button so you can i.e. undo a line after you switched from model to layout without swithing back to model.

When files are deleted they actually are not removed rather there space on the hard disk is marked as available, if you get a undelete program you can get the SV$ back but doing it 2 days later may not work, the sooner you undelete the better like lost 4 hours work, done straight away may have recovered nearly all.

Anyone undelete suggestions ? just a side issue you can undelete deleted emails.