topic Re: Can automatic recovery be trusted? in Fusion Support Forum

Can automatic recovery be trusted?

mroek — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 09:37:23 GMT

While working on my current project I've had a few crashes of Fusion (but none of the interesting ones allowed for sending in a crash report). Fortunately I was offered to open the automatic recovery file (each time), and so I did. This has happened three or four times now, and on two of these occasions I've noticed anomalies. My auto recovery interval is set to 5 minutes. Now, the two anomalies:

One time I lost data that was in a component that I had not touched for a long time. A whole string of features was lost, and it was so far back in time that I had to abandon that recovery and reopen my last saved version instead, as those features would have been a lot of work to recreate. That means I lost the latest features I had added (which was there in the recovery), and had to recreate those. I was most likely working with the timeline rolled back (but not to before the mentioned lost features) when this crash happened.
The second anomaly happened while working at the very end of the timeline. I was trying to add a new feature (a presspull), and while doing that, autosave kicked in and made Fusion unresponsive for a short time (which is OK). When it "came back" I continued with the presspull, but I pushed it a bit too far and Fusion threw an error (something about not being able to repair deleted faces) and then crashed. Upon reponening I was offered the recovery, which I then opened, only to discover that the sketch I had edited before adding the presspull had lost most of it's content. This sketch was closed prior to the autosave kicking in, so it shouldn't have lost data, I think.

The latter of these cases isn't too bad, but I'm really concerned about the first one. How on earth could I lose design data that was far back in time? At first I didn't notice either, because the component that lost data wasn't visible (because I hadn't worked on it for a long time), so I actually did some more work before discovering the data loss.

Has anyone else experienced something similar? It makes me very wary about the automatic recovery, as in a large design it can be difficult to spot selective data loss.

Re: Can automatic recovery be trusted?

innovatenate — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 15:21:55 GMT

Auto-save is not a feature that should be relied upon 100%. This is an “emergency” feature that is designed to help minimize data loss in the event of catastrophic failure. It is not a mechanism that should be depended upon or considered a replacement for the Save command.

If Fusion 360 is actively working on a process (e.g. rendering, solving a simulation, using the edit form command, etc.. ) then the auto-save can be skipped. Instead of relying on auto-save, I would encourage the use a a lesser known feature forcing an auto-save to the recovery directory which does not sync with the cloud. To manually save a recovery version of a document use the keyboard command:

Windows:

CTRL+SHIFT+S

Mac OS:

CMD+SHIFT+S

See this Screencast for more detail on how this feature works.

Here is how to access the saved recovery files.

I hope that helps. Let me know if you have any quesitons.

Thanks,

Re: Can automatic recovery be trusted?

mroek — Wed, 12 Apr 2017 00:21:09 GMT

Thanks. I didn't know about the command to explicitly save recovery. Might prove useful.

However, I think I've inadvertently been hitting that secret "crash Fusion"-command a few times. 🙂