Autosaves in Civil 3d

[JEFFJONES8251]

2018 Civil3D does not autosave.  We have 3 machines with slightly different user configurations and none of the the 3 will do autosaves.  

I know that SAVE - SAVE- SAVE is a best practice, but you always seem to occasionally forget.  AND we use autosaves as a fallback for corrupt drawings and to review what work was done on each day, and to go back to previous versions.

We jumped from 2016 to 2018, bypassing 2017.  All the settings in OPTIONS are identical, so far 3 weeks of work and not one autosave.

Thanks

[tcorey]

Have you had a crash? Autosave files are not retained if you save while in the drawing or if it is closed without crashing, so you might not notice if the file was created or not. Did you check the folder that is specified by SAVEFILEPATH? This defaults to user temp folder (%temp%).

[JEFFJONES8251]

No, we have not had a crash as of yet.  In the file set for autosaves, there is no current back up files from 2018.  We have the extension changed to .bak and the save time set to 10 minutes.  I know this created lots of backup files when using 2016, but none show up from 2018.  You could tell when 2016 would create a backup, as there would be the notivication in the lower right screen of a backup occurring and 2018 never indicates a backup being created.

With 2016 you had to watch the size and number of files in the autosave folder, and clean it out often.

Example is 6 hours of work done on a drawing, realized that wrong data was imported and used in the drawing.  Previously you could go to the old .bak file in the autosaves to get back to where you were yesterday, last week or when ever you had a saved backup.  No chance of that at all now, because there is no backup history of files. 

[dgorsman]

Have your IT people look into implementing Shadowcopy on the network storage.  We've got it set for hourly increments, and users can pull out old copies without relying on BAK files or needing IT to restore from nightly/weekly backups.  Just make sure users pull the COPY out of the system and replace the current file.

[JEFFJONES8251]

Interesting concept.  It sounds a little above our IT's head (me) as well as the office manager (me), office supervisor (me), survey crew supervisor (me) ....

Why did it work so well in 2016 and not with 2018?

[dmpe]

The autosave doesn't save to .bak, that's different. You should get .bak files created automatically in the same folder of your dwg, ISAVEBAK has to be set to 1.  The autosave creates a temporary copy of your file at that 10 min (or whatever you set) increment, which is stored in your user local as a .sv$ file.  That autosave file is constantly replaced, and only used if you crash...it will show up in the recovery where you simply open.  I think it is deleted automatically when you save and close, iirc. This is also how it worked in 2017.

[mathewkol]

The way backups and auto save files work is this...

1. As you work on a drawing, every 10 minutes and auto save file is created SV$.
2. When you close AutoCAD, these are removed.
3. When you crash, AutoCAD doesn't have a chance to remove them, so hey become available after a crash.
4. If you don't crash, there will be no SV$ files.
5. There will be only 1 SV$ file per drawing for every crash.

1. You create a new DWG. When you save it, the DWG on disc is copied and renamed BAK and the newly saved DWG becomes current.
2. Save again and that BAK gets replaced with the new copy of the DWG.
3. There will only be 1 BAK file for each drawing.

The behavior you describe seems to indicate that there are many BAK files for each of your drawings going back days or weeks. I have no idea how this could happen because it's not the way Autodesk implemented BAK files.

[dgorsman]

I'm starting to wonder if an auto-bak customization was in play, and/or some tweaked file permissions that allow for writing but not deleting BAK files.

[JEFFJONES8251]

In 2016 if you made the above changes you would see multiple timed backups of the drawings you had worked on (I had exaggerated the save time to 5 minutes to  see if I could get more backups).  Everything from 1-30 back in time is from v2016.  All 1 file dated 2-1 is from 1-31-18 using v 2018.

I have read that as an SV$ that they are deleted, but at least in the past with those changes you would get incremental backup files saved as specified.

Which works great for going back to where you were, like if the drawing got deleted, you wanted to verify work done on it (employees who forget to put time down on a job, you can go back to see that they did and when and get it billed) forgetting to save when closing out and things like that.

[lim.wendy]

Hi there,

By default, BAK files are created in the same folder as the drawing file.

Take a look at the MOVEBAK command. It changes the destination folder for drawing backup (BAK) files.

Once you specify a folder, the drawing's BAK file is placed in that folder after every save operation.

Enter new value for MOVEBAK, or . for none <current setting>:
Enter a . (period) for none or type the folder name

If you enter ".", the MOVEBAK folder name is cleared and new BAK files will be created in the original folder.