Latest Fusion 360 is unstable! Lost over 8 hours worth of work during a crash!

[markusbarnes]

I just lost over 8 hours of work after a crash!  This is the second time it has happened with the most recent release.  The first time I lost 3 hours.  I assumed the application autosaves, which was a gigantic mistake on my part.  Serves me right for getting too comfortable with a product.  I never had to worry about this before.

The crashed happened during an extrusion operation.  After a 30 minute beachball, I decided to force quit Fusion and restarted.  It didn't offer any recovery options.  I also couldn't find anything in the cryptic Fusion 360 install location.  I have always been able to recover at least the last ten or fifteen minutes of my work by simply restarting the application.  

I am extremely upset!  Heaven or hell, where's my backup!  

[TrippyLighting]

Don't hold my feet to the fire for this, it might not apply to your situation.

I've read before that autosave only works if you saved a new design at least once.

[markusbarnes]

Thanks. I  was working off of a previous version of the file in both cases and were on seperate machines running MacOS High Sierra.  The new version has new bugs and appears less stable. High Sierra uses the new APFS file system. It has a different way of writing file data. Perhaps, Fusion 360 isn't playing nice with it?  Just a thought.

 I also have been getting occasional errors where it claims it cannot upload the file. 

[HughesTooling]

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@TrippyLighting wrote:

Don't hold my feet to the fire for this, it might not apply to your situation.

I've read before that autosave only works if you saved a new design at least once.

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Don't know why some people have problems with autosave not working but you don't need to save first, I get recovered "Untitled" documents all the time that I don't want. I think closing Fusion and shutting windows down too quickly stops Fusion clearing the backups you don't want so they're recovered the next time you start Fusion.

@markusbarnes you might want to get in the habit of pressing Ctrl+Shift+S to force Autosaves. Have you noticed the message in the title bar while working that an Autosave is in progress and that it was created successfully?

Are you using Windows or mac?

Mark

[atherisinnovations]

@markusbarnes: There's definitely something unstable about this update of Fusion if you are on a mac.. OS 10.11.6 here and I have had 4 crashes in the past two days (3 today) when I hadn't had any crashes for about 4 months before that. So far it has been after leaving it open (while working in chrome on something else) and then coming back to do some moving/pasting of a body or features in the Model workspace.. spinning beachball un-ending..

As an aside, there are no release notes for this most recent update..

[lichtzeichenanlage]

@HughesTooling: I know those "Untitled" documents in the request dialog, too. But only (mostly???) if I open exported fusion files and (???) if Preferences -> General -> Automatic version on close is disabled.

[atherisinnovations]

I wanted to add some more details, 3 more crashes last night, but none so far this morning. Last night I was working with 'capture design history' off, trying to copy and paste objects caused crashes, this morning I switched 'capture design history' on and have had no problems so far. Left the mac on all night so there was no restart involved..

So maybe my issue is specific to modeling without 'capture design history' turned on?..

Also, not much input from autodesk.

I realize it is the weekend but a release went out on friday (at least that's when my machine said it had the latest and greatest version ready upon fusion restart), if there would be no one available to deal with potential issues that might arise then don't push the update.

Or, better yet, don't force the automatic update, let the user decide (within a 2-week or 1-month window) when to do an update, or allow a path to go back to a known working version (like 1 or 2 revisions back).

-Stephen

[TrippyLighting]

@atherisinnovations would you be able to share some of the designs that have this problem ?

[TrippyLighting]

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@HughesTooling wrote:

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@TrippyLighting wrote:

Don't hold my feet to the fire for this, it might not apply to your situation.

I've read before that autosave only works if you saved a new design at least once.

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Don't know why some people have problems with autosave not working

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Honestly, I don't either. But given the frequency of reports on the forum there is something to it.

[atherisinnovations]

@TrippyLighting: Sorry, the designs are only mostly owned by me, I cannot let any copies out.

[TrippyLighting]

No problem. I understand he concern.

[atherisinnovations]

For the record, the infinite beachball happened in parametric mode (capture design history on) as well yesterday, and the event coincided with other people being knocked off the internet here at home (a rarity) 2 out of the 3 times that it happened. I then switched to 'work offline' and had no problems whatsoever so it may be an issue with the network transfer process. And no one else lost connectivity while I was offline.

Again, this is with a mac mini i5 running 16gb ram with AMD Radeon 6630M, on OS 10.11.6. My copy of fusion 360 was downloaded from the autodesk website and it is ver2.0.4116. Had been working relatively smoothly for the past year and a half (have had some slowdowns since Nov2017 when switching active components but never any issues executing processes).

[jasonhomrighaus]

Ive also been experiencing extreme instability that seems to correlate with saves.  I have 2 files that now crash whenever I attempt to open them even thought the model the derived from seems fine.  I will try the offline trick to see what happens.

[tyler_henderson]

Hi Markus,

If you go to the File drop-down, is there nothing available in "Recover Documents"?

[markusbarnes]

Fusion 360 has a serious documentation problem.  Under the file menu?  All the docs say it's near the user menu with a red icon,.  Now, yoiu're telling me it's buried in the File menu which is rarely seen?  Anyway, there was nothing I could unearth digging through the digital mush installed by Fusion 360.

Can we have some control over our own data?  Do what you wanr on your cloud, but at least let us have q clue over where our data is stored on OUR machines. It doesn't help matters by completely ignoring established platform guidelines for where and how application and data is stored  This needs a major overhaul...promptly!

. 

[lichtzeichenanlage]

@markusbarnes:

• I don't know what's your problem with the documentation is. My installation matches this documentation completely. 
• I don't understand why people are choosing a heavily based product and than complaining that it's heavily cloud based.

[markusbarnes]

I am referring to the same poorly written documentation .  Perhaps, I should spell it out for you by walking you through what a typical user would experience.  

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• After the crash, restart Fusion 360, select the notification for crash recovery in the Notification Center, and follow the prompts to open and save the file.

OK, where's the notification icon?  

No notification icon.

Sigh... No go.  Wait...  The documentation says there's one more place to look:

• Use the Recover Documents command to review the file recovered design

Option is greyed out.

The option is disabled and says 0 documents.  Sigh.. No go again... Wait, there's another File menu:

Two File menus with different information, yet with the same information?  

OK. Last option is to search for the file. let's see:

• Manually browse to the following location. You can use the upload command to upload the appropriate *.f3d file

Oh boy.  I guess we have to search through the file directory:

Windows: 
C:\users\<username>\APPDATA\Roaming\Autodesk\Autodesk Fusion 360\<GUID>\CrashRecovery 
  
Mac OS (install from Autodesk.com site): 
 ~/Library/Application Support/Autodesk/Autodesk Fusion 360/<GUID>/CrashRecovery 
  
Mac OS (install from Apple Store): 
~/Library/Containers/com.autodesk.mas.fusion360/Data/Library/Application Support/Autodesk/Autodesk Fusion 360/<GUID>/CrashRecovery 

Wait. You mean how I installed the application determines where the recovery files are located?  Oh, well blame Apple then.  But, I don't see a Library folder.  Hmmm.   Oh. It's hidden by default.  But there's no folder with the name "<GUID>".  Oh...  That's one of those cryptic ID thingies..  Well, there's no files there either.  I give up.

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If this is your idea of quality documentation and UI, I am left speechless.  I would expect such quality from a no budget open source project, but from a multi-billion dollar corporation whose overhead is only office space, salaries, free sodas and perhaps the occasional pizza party?  

[atherisinnovations]

This is kind of ridiculous.

I literally have to make sure I am offline before I do anything intense, I forgot to do that today and lost about 30min of work that I had done before it locked up while trying to edit a sketch (crash report number CER_170967940). Maybe there is a recovery file, and 30min isn't the end of the world, but that's not the point.

This was working fine on x.x.4114, now on x.x.4116 it is stalling left and right, but there's nothing I can do because ALL UPDATES ARE FORCED EVEN IF THEY DESTROY FUNCTIONALITY, WITH NO WAY TO GO BACK TO A PREVIOUS VERSION. The best I'd be able to do is make daily clones of my system with the hopes that I could go offline and re-load the OS to work in the previously released version for 2 weeks before I'm shut down, and that's if I determine there's a problem right away..

@Autodesk; @tyler_henderson:

Hi. Fusion has been awesome, but the situation I am in is costing me time and a little bit of money. I need the stable system I had before the x.x.4116 update, so please budget a way for us peons a way to maintain productivity in the event that one of your updates is wonky. PLEASE ALLOW US A WAY TO GO BACK ONE OR TWO REVISIONS, and PLEASE ALLOW US A WINDOW TO SCHEDULE UPDATES!!

Please respond as well, thank you!

[tyler_henderson]

I'm really sorry to hear about the increase in crashes and lost data.  We have another Hotfix coming out soon which is meant to address some of these issues.  Please let us know if Fusion is still unstable after the new Hotfix.  And as always, please continue to submit the Crash Error Reports with as much information as possible.  Those really do help us diagnose the problems so we can release targeted solutions.

Regarding the documentation, we are always trying to make sure our Help content is up to date and matches changes in the product.  But on occasion something gets overlooked.  We will work to improve the Help about accessing recovered documents.

Regarding the ability to roll back to a previous version of Fusion, this is something that we are looking into, we are definitely not dismissing it.  But I'm sure you all can appreciate the challenges for something like that, especially when dealing with data migration.

[maxwatts]

This application is flakey, period.

I've had many, many random crashes, so I am unable to narrow it down to a specific point or operation that I'm performing.

I've even had it crash during a save, which is absurd, and the resultant dialog telling me sorry, etc., is scant consolation.

Here's the latest example:

I extruded a simple sketch, and added a few features, and bang, there she went.

A restart told me I had recoverable files, and I retrieved the file from where I was. Good, you would think...

I worked on, and then saved the file, now content that I now had my latest version all retrieved and updated. Good, you would think (2)...

However, on next open, all the bodies had vanished, with the history, but the sketch remained. I had most definitely saved the latest work. No recoverable was available.

The MacOS path alluded to in another 'lost file' thread (just how many are there?), does not exist. Work was gone, and now has to be re-done.

I'm a hobbyist, with limited skills, and trivial designs. This is extremely frustrating. Were I a semi-pro, professional, or even spending time doing more complicated designs (which I can not be certain are being saved properly, even when I *save* them), my solicitor would be contacting Autodesk, and I'm 100% certain he would not be the first.

I've asked some stupid questions on these forums, and have been gently guided towards the solution, without anybody berating my noobness, for which I am grateful. However, I cannot see any way in which the symptoms I describe above are in any way connected to my ignorance. I use a recent iMac, with a recent MacOs version, and which runs 99% of everything extremely smoothly, and rarely does an application need to be forced to quit. Fusion is an unwelcome exception.

I hesitate to criticise a piece of software that is beyond my comprehension, both in its scale and complexity. However, you could build me a spaceship that the same would apply to, and I wouldn't be getting on board if it had a 99% success rate of getting into orbit. Fusion's success rate is far less. Maybe not a great analogy, but it is what it is.

I shall look forward to a time when Fusion 360 has 'fail gracefully' built in as a priority, and it works.

Just my two cents worth...

Max