Strange Saving Behaviors

[garak0410]

So I have two users (one on AutoCAD LT 2023 and the other on 2024) and both are reporting strange drawing saving issues. 

The user on 2023 said he did a lot of work on a drawing and when he went back into the drawing, a good bulk of his work was missing. We do take shadow copies on our local server but he was unable to recover it because it was still missing on all versions. 

The user on 2024, had parts of his drawing his disappear in front of his face with no interaction. He also desribed the problem as this:

mine reverted back to the way it was when i opened it as a result of pushing the save button, and told me there was nothing to undo when i tried to undo that last command. i made all my changes again and saved again... same result. i ended up having to re-convert the dxf file to dwg and start fresh to get it to save my work after i did it

Any suggestions?

[pendean]

Did a lot of work, went back to the wrong place to open an older file perhaps? Or did your backup method restore instead of backing up?

How AutoCAD (and LT) save files when you activate the command if that help you explore deeper:
a TMP file is created.
the BAK file is deleted.
the DWG file is renamed BAK.
the TMP file is renamed DWG.

I don't see how a file would "revert" unless a lot of actions were prevented.

"autosave" in AutoCAD creates files in the user's login temp folder, they both may find newer variants of their file there if there are not other system blockers that messed up there too.

[paullimapa]

Shadow copy is an excellent way to go back to prior saved dwg versions. If those prior versions don’t include any of the dwg changes then the user either never did a save or saved the file to a different location or never even worked on that particular file in the first place. As for dxf there is no real conversion necessary. It’s just a matter of using AutoCAD 2024 open command almost like a dwg. But if user never did a save to create a dwg file then there won’t be one to use on the next go around. 

[Kent1Cooper]

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@garak0410 wrote:

.... as a result of pushing the save button, ....

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Grabbing at straws here....  Is it possible they typed in the command name SAVE rather than picked on a [so-called] Save button or icon?  A lot of people are unaware that what you actually get from the little diskette icon in the ribbon, or the bigger one in the big-A pull-down, as well as from Ctrl+S, is the QSAVE command.  The SAVE command is different -- it makes an external drawing file of the current state of things, but leaves you in the drawing you're in, not in the one it just made.  [The SAVEAS command makes an external drawing file and leaves you in that new one.]  SAVE is not in the default ribbon, so it's unlikely you would get it by accident, unless the accident was to type it in, mistakenly thinking you were Saving the current drawing in-place.  And it asks for a place and name to Save it to, which QSAVE [however you invoke it] does not except in an as-yet-unnamed drawing, so you would presumably notice if you accidentally used SAVE instead of QSAVE, and you should presumably have some idea where you put it.

Any of those commands cuts off the program's awareness that things have been done that have not yet been saved.  So if you do some work in drawing A, and use SAVE instead of QSAVE, thereby making drawing B, and then immediately close drawing A, you will not be asked whether you want to save your changes, and drawing A's file will not be updated to include those changes, which will not be in drawing A when you next open it.  But they will be in drawing B.