Fusion 360 :How best backup a Design?

[I_B_Jones]

Hi. In Fusion 360, what's the best way to "backup" a Design before I make significant changes to clean up the Timeline etc.?

I want to create an independent exact copy that I can revert to if my changes break the Design.

I've searched the Tutorials and Forum etc., but not found any guidance.

There's a Copy action in the Data Panel on each Design entry. I used that, but the resulting new entry in the Data Panel seems to do nothing and have no actions behind it, except Rename and Delete, so I don't even know what that item is.

Clicking on it displays nothing in the Design work pane.

Double clicking on it changes the way it is displayed in the Data Panel, but achieves nothing else I can see.

[HughesTooling · Accepted solution]

Every time you save a version is saved, you can open or promote any of the previous versions. Click the i then click to see versions, you then have the option to open any of your previous saves. 

The other option you have is right click the top component in the browser and select save copy as. Be careful with the name you give the copy as you can have 2 files with the same name.

Mark

[I_B_Jones]

Mark, Hello and thank you.

Yes, I'm aware of the versioning side of F360, but having considerable IT and data analysis/systems design experience, I know at the data structure level that versioning is complex and can easily go wrong unless it's implemented as a file save per version. So it's not a mechanism I'd happily trust until it is well proven and the product is stable. Its a process that is very easily broken by product enhancements and data structure changes.

The Save As option looks much more promising and I'll give it a try. If it saves as a separate computer file (i.e. a true copy and independent file) and can be opened as a separate Design then I'll be happy. I think my mistake was in trying to make a copy from the Data Panel before opening the Design. I'd assumed that the Data Panel should be where top level copies, etc. would happen from rather than from within an open Design. Logically one should be able to do it from either place, but I guess that's not there yet.

When I selected a Design in the Data Panel and then the Copy dropdown command, it produced a new "folder" icon in the Data Panel, but there seemed nothing I could do with it except Rename or Delete. So I've no idea what that Copy command achieves.

Many thanks for you help.

[HughesTooling]

I just had a look at the copy command in the data panel. I think it's designed to copy to another project or folder so there's no option to change the name of the file you're coping, if you just click the Select button without changing folders it makes a copy in the same folder as the original file with the same name. Here you can see I have a new copy at V1 and the original at V5.

Mark

[I_B_Jones]

Hi Mark. That's interesting - it's not the result that I got when I did it yesterday. When I selected my Design in the Data Panel then Copy from the dropdown menu I got a dialogue pane allowing me to select the target Project and new (deisgn?) Name. On clicking 'go' it took ages but I eventually got a new entry in the Data Panel with a grey "folder" icon and the chosen name. But that item seems to have no capability. It cannot be opened as a Design and does not have any menu actions except Rename and Delete. Most odd. I'll delete it.

However, I have now followed your open Design, select top Component and Save As procedure, and that seems to have worked ok.

Many thanks.

[HughesTooling]

Something that might affect how the copy works is if you have linked components in the design. I think the copy might make copies of the linked parts as well so you'd need a new folder. By the way this is the dialog I get when I select copy in the data panel.

Mark

[I_B_Jones]

Hi Mark.  Yes, I had the same dialogue.

Unfortunately my "Backup" intentions failed - I wanted to clean up the Design's Timeline etc., but F360 obviously still has bugs in that area as I rapidly got errors that should not have happened.

So I'm having to restart the Design from scratch.

I think I'm soon going to be raising a new Forum topic under IdeaStation on "Timeline and Activate".

Thanks for your interest and help.

Lets consider this Topic item closed now shall we...

[TrippyLighting]

You can export a local copy to your hadr drive, dropbox wahtever as a .f3d ot r .f3z and use that as a bckup. Not entirely a bad idea1

You can then re-open these with "new file from design"a dn save them to the data panel.

However, that .f3d/.f3z AFAIK does not inclde the vesion history. Only the current version is exported.

Now we can close ths issue.

Also, if you have a file that creates re-build errors that should not be happening (I've recently had my own issues with this), please consider create a new thread for it and share the file with the developers. It really helps debugging efforts, as you know.

[HughesTooling]

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@TrippyLighting wrote:

However, that .f3d/.f3z AFAIK does not inclde the vesion history. Only the current version is exported.

That's something I hadn't thought about, there doesn't seem to be a way to make a copy and keep all the version. Even copies made in the data panel or with the dashboard have none of the versions in the original file.

Mark