bak files in temp folder

[Anonymous]

some of my coworkers , using autocad 2014  on windows 7 , have bak files in temporary folder,  in addition to "normal" bak file in the current folder.

these bak files apparently are not deleted when autocad closes , unlike sv$ files .

although this is rather convenient , it is not consistant with help which says autosave creates sv$ files , not bak

also according to help , there is only one bak file created per save , in current working forlder 

any idea what this is ?

[m_kingdon]

Not sure what the question is, but I guess the files you are talking about are autosave files.  These are the files that come to your rescue when autocad crashes, which luckily seems to happen a lot less now.

[Anonymous]

I know that .

my question is , why are there bak files in that folder

[m_kingdon]

I guess AutoCAD has 2 types of backup files. For when CAD crashes and for when you open CAD but you can't open a drawing.

sv$ files, for when Autocad closes unexpectedly. This file get deleted when CAD is successfully closed down. CAD will refer to this file if autocad closes unexpectedly

bak file, for when you try and open a dwg file but it is corrupt or missing.

[pendean]

Which temp folder? Are they running add-ons? Creating extra BAK files? Are they working in Temp folders?

[nestly2 · Accepted solution]

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mrkaplan wrote:

..... why are there bak files in that folder

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 I accumulate .bak files in my Temp folder as a result of opening dwg files directly from the internet rather than saving and then opening them locally, so perhaps check permissions.  Also might happen if the files is opened in read-only mode, but I'm not sure about that.

Also might want to make sure MOVEBAK is not the cause

[Anonymous]

 i know the difference btw bak and sv$ files

according to help , there should be no bak files in temp folder along with sv$ files

please read again my previous answer .

[pendean]

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/autocad-2013-2014-2015-2016/bak-files-in-temp-folder/m-p/5566682#M7707...

[Anonymous]

the temp folder im referring to is

C:\Users\username\appdata\local\temp\

they are not working in that folder

yes , the bak files there are extra bak files . they also have the 'usual' bak files  in the same folder as the dwgs

they are not ruuning any add ons that i know of , they use plain 2014 acad

[m_kingdon]

My temp folder has a lot of recent .bak files, but not many drawings I worked on a few weeks ago. Thinking about the work I have done recently...

My theory is:

If you have a drawing open for some time (longer than 5 minutes) and then close it and don't save, a .bak file will stay in the temp folder.

If you have a drawing open and then save, a .bak file will be in the same folder as the .dwg file and not the temp folder.

[Anonymous]

to Nestly  ; Difficult to investigate further as these pcs are not mine, but i m guessing you could be rght.

also they don't have express tools so movebak is not the issue

[micpfeifer]

Has anyone found the answer to this post?

I know this thread is a bit older, but I am looking for the answer to this specific question. 

All of the workstations in my office create two bak files as described in this post except for one. 

I would like to enable this feature, but I am not able to figure out how to do it. 

The more I research the more I am not even sure its an intended feature of AutoCAD.

Please advise.

[Anonymous]

We're experiencing the same issue with AutoCAD 2016 on our Windows 7 64-bit computers.  I've never noticed bak files being saved in the temp folder until yesterday when I realized that 4 hours of my work vanished without a trace.  

I agree it's convenient to have them, but for us there is another issue.  For some reason, there are times that our dwg doesn't update when saved.  For example, yesterday I went into a drawing at 10:10am and finished making changes at about 10:30am.  I can assure you that I probably qsaved 20 times during that time.  I got out of the drawing at 10:30am to go into another drawing.  When I went back to the drawing a few minutes later, all of the work that I had done was not there.  The dwg showed my last save was at 10:15am.  The bak file which is always one version behind had a time stamp for the day before.  I then went to my temp folder and there were no sv$ which indicates that there were no crashes and that successful saves were made after drawing changes.  But there was another bak file.  The bak file starts off with the same exact dwg file name, but then adds some random looking numbers to the end.  The time stamp for this bak file was 10:28am which is right before I closed the drawing.  Why would this have a later date than my source drawing?  And wouldn't it at least match the bak file in the source folder of the dwg?  I changed the extension to dwg and opened the drawing.  All the work that I had done was there.

There's another guy in the office that has been complaining about work that he was doing just vanishing like he had never done it, though he could show me proof with hardcopies that he had actually done the work.  He was working in AutoCAD 2013.  I didn't know to look for the bak files and didn't notice them when I looked for his sv$ at that time.

We are stumped.  One thing to mention is that we recently upgraded to a new server.  I don't know if that could possibly be the cause of any of this, but thought it was worth mentioning.  I came across another post about issues saving to a network drive (which we do) in which someone had replied and mentioned the problem could be related to the server.

I checked a number of our workstations here and noticed that all of them having been randomly saving bak files not only to the source dwg folder but to the temp folder as well - even if the user hasn't experienced lost work.

Mark

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your input on this.  I'm trying to figure out a related issue.  I tested your theory about waiting more than 5 minute and closing out.  It didn't save a new bak file in the temp folder nor update the one that was already in there.  From my understanding, if changes were made and not saved...it's lost forever.  If changes were made but autocad crashes, then the sv$ should be there.

[micpfeifer]

I reposted this question here, while I don't feel I have found the solution to our question, I did find out some interesting infromation regaurding about how anti-virus software maybe part of the problem for some people. 

I hope this helps.