Recovering read-only file

[Anonymous]

Hi, I'm a student from Melbourne, Australia. So The drawing I was working on for the last 4 weeks got locked as in a read-only file. I don't even how'd that happen but there wasn't any issue working on the file till yesterday then my laptop suddenly restarted when it was turned, I went on files where I saved the drawing but I came to notice all work I've been doing, has been deleted. Is there any I can recover them? 

[Patchy]

Look for .bak file with the same name and rename the .bak to .dwg

[Anonymous]

Tried. But still it didn't bring back my recent work. Like when it's open
it has only the preliminary drawings. All the detailed sections and floor
plans are missing

[Anonymous]

Are you saving your files locally or on a server/network?

If locally, you can try to restore from either a backup (if you have one), or possibly from the "Previous versions" function >how-to<  (the link is for Win7, but the process is the same in Win10)

If on a server, such as at school, you may need to get someone from the IT department involved.

[pendean]

There are many things you can try, assuming you manually saved often while drafting, explore here
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/AutoCA...

and

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/learn-explore/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Understa...

After that, look for your daily backups of all of your files, which hopefully you do regularly over the last 4-weeks.

[dmfrazier]

If you have Autosave turned on in your current AutoCAD profile (see Options), and if the increment is sufficiently frequent, then there may (should) be automatically saved "versions" of the files you have worked on. The location for these files is determined by the Automatic Save Files Location on the Files tab of Options (also part of the current profile). You can try the Drawing Recovery Manager to find them, or you can use File Explorer to browse the folder "manually". The files will have names similar to the files you worked on, with random characters added at the end, and may appear with both BAK and SV$ filename extensions. They are valid DWG files, so renaming them with a DWG filename extension enables you to open them in AutoCAD.

[RobDraw]

I'm afraid that autosave is not the solution for this. Autosave files are normally deleted when the file is closed without AutoCAD crashing.

[dmfrazier]

"Autosave files are normally deleted when the file is closed without AutoCAD crashing."

Not true in my experience.

[RobDraw]

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@dmfrazier wrote:

Not true in my experience.

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You should fact check such statements before posting. Your experience is something other than normal AutoCAD behavior or your system has some custom settings that interfere with normal operations.

"If AutoCAD crashes or is otherwise abnormally terminated during a session, data saved in . sv$ files can be recovered by locating the autosave file, renaming the . sv$ extension to .dwg and then opening that file in AutoCAD. The autosave file will contain all drawing information as of the last time autosave ran. When AutoCAD closes normally, . sv$ files are deleted as any open drawings would be closed/saved normally."

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/learn-explore/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Understa...

[dmfrazier]

Well, certainly if you consider the SV$ files the only files Autosave produces. My Autosave folder is full of BAKs.

[RobDraw]

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@dmfrazier wrote:

Well, certainly if you consider the SV$ files the only files Autosave produces. My Autosave folder is full of BAKs.

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That just proves that your experience has not included a proper understanding of back-up and autosave files.

Do you know that there is a difference between the purpose of autosave files and back-up files and that they are created for different reasons?

If you had read that page I linked to, you would.

[dmfrazier]

"...your experience has not included a proper understanding of back-up and autosave files."

I have to admit that you are (at least partly) correct.

In my environment, where we upgrade AutoCAD only when the DWG file version change "forces" us to do so, and where we are not able to upgrade all users all at once, the "policy" for many years and releases has been to set the "Save As" option to the previous DWG file version, (obviously) to avoid the incompatible version issue when sharing/collaborating with users who are still running the previous version. We have been doing this for so long that "in my experience" we have "always" had BAK files in our Autosave folders, and if I ever did understand the actual mechanics of why they were there (I probably didn't), clearly I was not cognizant of it when I replied to the OP's issue.

Thanks for the correction.

[RobDraw]

One thing that people have to remember when talking about AutoCAD functionality is that the AutoCAD is very customizable and sometimes those customizations override the original functionality and sometimes even the intended purpose of said functions.

[Anonymous]

As to the how & why .bak's get created, or not, depends on your selection in "Options"-it is checked by default, and stays until you un-check it (as far as I know it does, as I uncheck it every time I install a new version) Since I run full backups every day, i never found a use for the .baks

See attached

[dmfrazier]

"One thing that people have to remember..."

Yeah, among thousands of other things. (I'm running out of brain cells.)

[dmfrazier]

"...as I uncheck it every time I install a new version..."

I'm very familiar with the setting. In my environment, this is always on. I'd rather err on the side of having "too much" when it comes to back-ups. As our IT head says, "Disk space is cheap." (Of course, he also complains about how long back-ups take...)