Expert: Bob - 12/7/2009

Question
My autosave feature doesn't appear to work consistantly on mine or my colleagues version of autocad 2006.
I have the Autosave feature set at 10mins between saves yet sometimes when I try to recover a lost drawing and look in the autosave drawing location folder there is nothing within the last week even. I appreciate that this is an old version of Autocad that we are still using but was there ever an issue with this feature with this release of Autocad as I never had a prob lem with the previous version.
I've never used one of these question/answer sites before so please excuse my quetion structure.

Answer
Hi-- You have a misunderstanding of Autosave -- and you don't say how frequently you get crashing, or describe your work or your computer specs, but here is the general reply:

Unfortunately, Autosave is not foolproof -- and (sorry), we can feel foolish when we do not save our drawings regularly. It is particularly important to save constantly when working on problematic drawings which are prone to crash. In addition, when I save regularly, I have a .bak file that is useable, not ancient.

I have advised students (and done so myself) to place a Post-it on the monitor - SAVE - when working on projects that tend to crash. In addition, I soon learned to SAVEAS a new name each day, when I was experiencing crashing (ie, Jones House Dec 7).

Autosave is ONLY a "try to catch it when the drawing fails" kind of thing, rather than a secure promise from AutoCAD that there will be a back up. On 2006 and prior, I have seen crashes not only take out the Autosave drawing, but take out the last several saves on the main drawing (rare).

In other words, when I have an unreliable belt, I am smart to wear braces as well, or get better trousers. THAT is how I learned to think of AutoCAD. The newer ones are somewhat better.

I hope this helps.

BOB