Anybody know of a way for Autocad to save a CURRENT copy of the drawing whether the drawing crashes or not other than manually hitting save. Spent a day working on a drawing and being pre-occupied with other things, I somehow managed to exit without saving (my mouse took on a life of its' own and don't recall the save window coming up)and lost everything. It would be nice if a current copy of the drawing was maintained with the AUTOSAVE.
I thought autocad automatically has autosave on unless you have specifically turned it off in your options???
Type Options, Select Open and Save Tab, Lower left area of this tab is a File Safety Precautions section. There should be a check box to allow autosave and a type box that allows the user to set the amount of time in minutes between autosaves. You can also select if you would like a backup copy, .bak saved with each autosave.
Now select the Files Tab, and aboout the 10th one down is Automatic Save File Location where you can set your autosave store folder.
Copy the associated .bak file to another folder and change the name from *.bak to *.dwg. Open it and take off where you left off.
The autosave only works if the drawing crashes. When you close out of Autocad (saving or not saving), the autosave file is removed from the directory it is stored in. renaming the bak file only works for the last instance of the drawing that is saved. If you work on a drawing all day and forget to save, I think you're SOL. Someone correct me if I'm wrong?
CORRECTION
SAVETIME
Type: Integer
Saved in: Registry
Initial value: 120
Sets the automatic save interval, in minutes.
0 Turns off automatic saving
(Greater than symbol)0 Automatically saves the drawing at intervals specified by the nonzero integer
The SAVETIME timer starts as soon as you make a change to a drawing. It is reset and restarted by a manual SAVE, SAVEAS, or QSAVE. The current drawing is saved to auto.sv$.
EDIT: The (greater than symbol) messed up my HTML for some reason.
Use the {shift .} key for the (greater than symbol)
I disagree. The autosave function will save your file at what ever interval you set it too. The default file type is not .DWG. It defaults to ac$, but you can change the default. Also to open an autosave file just change the .ac$ to .DWG and open the file. You can also set the file location to something not as hard to find as the default location.
Autosave is the closet thing to an easy button we get in CAD. I cannot count the times it has save my a$$ when CAD crashes or I mess up.
Mine is set to autosave every 15 min, doesn't matter if it crashes or not, it's still the same as the last time it autosaved.
Just don't open the drawing again without renaming the autosaved one....:-$
I agree, I have a folder on my computer that is filled with autosaves. Every 15 min, new file. Perhaps the OP is not looking in the correct folder for the autosaved files?
I really wish AutoSave could be set to save iterations ... like the last 5 autosaves. I had a drawing crash recently due to a power outage, and for some reason the drawing was corrupted, and I believe when I tried to open the drawing after restarting the computer, it deleted the autosave file and created a new back up (which was also corrupted), and I lost the whole thing. Really made me mad since I thought I was doing everything right.
That day I went to Best Buy and bought a Uninterrupted Battery Power Backup.
> The autosave only works if the drawing crashes. When you close out of Autocad (saving or not saving), the autosave file is removed from the directory it is stored in. renaming the bak file only works for the last instance of the drawing that is saved. If you work on a drawing all day and forget to save, I think you're SOL. Someone correct me if I'm wrong?
Yep, Sir Veysalot has it. Per the AutoCAD help file:
If you turn on the automatic saving option, AutoCAD saves your drawing at specified time intervals. By default, files saved automatically are temporarily assigned the name filename_a_b_nnnn.sv$. The file name is the current drawing name, a is the number of open instances of the same drawing file in the same AutoCAD session, b is the number of open instances of the same drawing in different sessions of AutoCAD, and nnnn is a random number generated by AutoCAD.
Files that are automatically saved are deleted when AutoCAD closes a drawing in the normal way. Saved files remain in the event of a crash or power failure. To recover a previous version of your drawing from the automatically saved file, rename the file using a .dwg extension.
Listen to Joe-Nathan, he has autosave figured out
You are correct sir.