Open Backup/Recovery File

[ben]

The model I received didn't have all the piping lined up, so I was fixing some mistakes. I went to a section view & aligned the pipe so it was running at the same elevation. When I did that, I think that's when it moved/deleted/something to all my stools connected in the area where I changed the elevation. Unfortunately I didn't notice this until after I saved & synced, so I can't undo the changes.

I've never had to do it with Revit, but I remember with AutoCAD there was a .bak file that you could just rename the extension  to .dwg and you were back up and running on the backup file. I looked in the "_backup" folder to see if there's something similar to that in there, but there's over 150 files in that folder. Which one(s) would be the backup file to restore a previous model?

[RobDraw · Accepted solution]

See this:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/revit-products/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2015/EN...

[ben · Accepted solution]

It's weird, when I followed the instructions and went to the backup folder it didn't show any previous versions.

I'm glad I remembered our IT guy showed me this trick. Completely outside of Revit, just in Windows folder. Navigate to the folder where the model is saved, right click, properties, previous versions, double click on the folder's day & time you want to restore, it'll then open a previous version of the folder & it's contents from that day & time, copy the Revit model from that folder, and paste it into the current folder & have it paste over the existing file.

That trick will only work if your computer or company server are setup to save recovery files/previous versions of files & folders, and it probably wont give you as many previous backup versions as the Restore Backup would give you, but the Restore Backup didn't work for me so it was either that or nothing. Luckily I restored from right away this morning which was a model that was last saved from the end of the day yesterday.

[RobDraw]

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@ben wrote:

It's weird, when I followed the instructions and went to the backup folder it didn't show any previous versions.

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Yeah, that one gets me too. That dialog box is not to open the back-up. Hit open even though you can't select anything. That dialog will close and then another box will come up with a list of available back-ups.

[ben]

@RobDraw I feel like an even bigger idiot! I wasn't a matter of something getting deleted at all. I noticed the "fixtures" that the engineer had put in (which are just a family of a couple extrusions with connectors, one for sewer & one for water, easy to miss) they were still there even though the stools & stalls were missing. So I started looking around the model more and noticed some walls were missing, I checked my links and the d*** Arch model got unloaded somehow haha It was easy to miss because a lot of the walls from the Arch & Struct models overlap so a lot of the walls were there via the Struct model, but some of the non-load bearing interior walls were missing.

So nothing was actually wrong or got deleted, and by recovering my file I only lost the little bit of work I did on it this morning.