Is it intentional that comments just disappear?

[TheRealWilliam]

Hi, 

sometimes, I am using the comments panel inside Fusion360 to take notes for myself. But these comments keep on disappearing. Maybe they disappear when Fusion is updated? Or when I edit the design with another account? Any suggestions?

[Phil.E]

To answer your question: no.

Are the comments disappearing after you have posted them, and then saved and closed the design? Or do they disappear while you are trying to edit them (as you create one)?

Does this happen with 100% of comments, or just some?

[TheRealWilliam]

Hi, it happens to all my comments. All of them have disappered. I wrote a comment (sometimes with a reference to a point), saved the comment and saved the design. They were made in different versions of my design and accumulated over time. Fusion has also been updated at least once before I noticed that everything is gone. But as far as I remember, this has always been the case. Comments have never been permanent for me, thats why I thought that comments get deleted when I save a new version of a design.

[Phil.E]

That is really strange. Just to be clear, you see these comments getting "saved" and put into the comment log structure, sort of like this. And later when you open the design, the log has no entries.

(In this image I'm showing a design that is at v7, while my comment was made at v5.)

[TheRealWilliam]

I found the reason for the missing comments:

When I have major changes in a design, I sometimes use File -> SaveAs to create another "major version" of my design with a new name. When I do this, all comments are deleted from the new file. That is not how it should be in my opinion.

(I am using Fusion360 since quite a while, and in the beginning, Fusion crashed veeeery often. That is why I am used to click 'save' every 5 minutes... And that is the reason why my designs usually have very high version numbers, and from time to time I need to give the design a new file name in order not to be confused.)

[Phil.E · Accepted solution]

Got it. This makes sense.

So just to be clear. When you save a copy of a design, the comment history is not "deleted". It simply doesn't exist yet in the new design because it is a new design. All new designs start at V1. Any comments in the old design are for that design, being a part of its history, and reference other versions of that design. New designs start off with no comments referencing other designs and old versions in those other designs.

A couple things that might help you:

• By default Fusion gathers a recovery file every 5 minutes. If you crash these are available to get you back on track quickly.
• Your crashes are happening only once every 2-4 months for more than a year. I think you are pretty stable and don't need to save every 5 minutes.
• Fusion now has "milestones" which are special version markers for "important versions". 
• Using Save-As should never be needed, especially if you wish to have a running narrative of history comments about a particular design.

[guynamedben]

I have to chime in here to say that this is still very much an unsolved issue.  I have stopped using comments altogether because I cannot rely on a comment to remain in the comments box on a file under any condition.  Even if I don't close Fusion 360 I have found that comments will disappear while I am continuously working on a project.  This is quite aggravating as being able to leave notes on a project is one of the most basic features that I would expect to be workable in ANY type of design software.  

[minu_10]

I just want to insist that this is still an ongoing problem. My comments just dissappear after being correctly saved. I just check them immediately and they are there and the file can be saved, however when I reopen the file later the entire comment list has just vanished.

[Phil.E]

This is not expected, and it sounds like a bug that needs to be fixed. The only unfortunate thing here is finding a way to reproduce the effect, because usually debugging requires reproducing the workflow that creates the bad result. 

I tested this in windows 10 and did not immediately reproduce it, but that isn't conclusive. Can you help me test this by providing a video, or details about what OS you are using, and build number of Fusion?