.ac$

[Anonymous]

My Autocad crash down last week. I don't have the latest .bak or .dwg files, but I found the .ac$ file generated by Autocad. How can I convert or recover this .ac$ file into .dwg or any other file formats which I will be able to open with Autocad after.

[Anonymous]

Do you have any AUTOSAVE files.  They will have the .SV$ file extension.

[Anonymous]

No I don't, well, yess, but it was corrupted by the crashdown. That is why, I would like to use the ac$. In Cad option, it's said the autocad will create a temporary file called .ac$. I found it, but I'm not able to recover it.

[Anonymous]

I am surprise that AutoCAD create a temporary file and that we cannot use it... I work with autocad since version 9 (over 20 years ago) and I remember that we can recover from .ac$, I believe with version 12 or 13 of autocad just by renaming the extension like we can do it with .bak files.

[Anonymous]

A file with the AC$ file extension is an AutoCAD Undo Info file, its not a backup or automatic save file.

You can try to INSERT the corrupted drawing into a brand new file, see if that works.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Here is some additional information with file types:

BAK files are backup files created on manual Saves (save commands) in AutoCAD.
SV$ files are automatic timed backups (autosave) of drawings.
AC$ files are temporary AutoCAD working files for various functions (undo, hidden lines...), ac$ files do not contain drawing data

[Anonymous]

Thank you for your support.

[Anonymous]

I have my autosave set for 20 minutes which seems to be a reasonable time span. When an autosave occurs, I rarely get a sv$, mostly ac$ listing. My paths are correcly sent to the C:\user...\temp folder. I have a large and fragile project that I try to keep from crashing, but it does crash sometimes in spite of my best efforts to coax it along. When I go looking for a sv$ to recreate my lost work I don't have any, just truncated .temp files and ac$ files.

I am using Civil 3D 2013 with SP2 installed. I am not allowed to increase my swap space on the hard drive (IT does not understand what this is or why I might need to do so), I have 16 g of RAM on this machine.

I used to get sv$ files written out routinely. Do you have any hints on how to get them back? I was thinking of shortening my autosave to 15 minutes-10 minutes interrupts my work flow.

Thanks to anyone helping me out.

Susan

[mapping]

in the options menu (open and save tab) you can change the default ac$ autosave file extension to sv$, this means the next time AutoCAD crashes you will have a recoverable file.

Also i would change your autosave time period to between 2 and 5 minutes, 

20 minutes means you could loose 20 minutes work + 20 minutes to redo the lost work + time needed to recover the file.