forum.datacad.com

We have found over the years that autosave is of limited value when the program crashes...it seems to be a lot more effective to go into temp files and save out the swap file from the affected file even with autosave set on a relatively close interval (we typically use 15minutes) we still often loose an hour plus of work. Of course the best thing is to do a forced save but it would be great if the file shelled out autosaves in much the same way it does sessions ...without constant user input. Am I alone in this desire? Or is there a macro that does this that I am unaware of?

TIm

Forming a habit of hitting Control-S as often as you think of it - will save a lot of grief.

..or work with Caps Lock on and just press the F key (File save).

In Chapter 2: The Drawing Board of the DataCAD Manual (about page 91), you'll find a thorough explanation of how DataCAD handles auto-recover files under File Open, Backup, and Recover Process. Note: whenever you recover the most recent version of a file after exiting DataCAD abnormally, a copy of the current AEC file is copied to the Recover_Archive folder. This is done to isolate the file from the subsequent recovery and future saves.

As for having DataCAD perform a Forced Save instead of an Auto-recover Save, this would prevent you from being able to exit a drawing without saving your changes. I suppose you could tack an F to your most frequently used keyboard macro, but how is that better than pressing [Shift] + [F] or [Ctrl] + [S]?

There's also the "What do I do when I chose not to save my changes when I should have chosen to save my changes?"

One of my edits of the DcadWin.MNU file, is to add Control-Shift-A to Save All the open drawings at once.

I do this so that I can then use another edit to that file, to have Control-F do a Refresh All XRefs.

So, Control-Shift-A then Control-F to save all open files so the XRefs can then be refreshed to update them all.

I personally would like to see auto-save in it's current state replaced with a version that is similar to how the sessions work. A Recover Session folder that can be set as global folder or a folder next to the AEC files that auto quick saves an AEC file at a set interval with a max file count. I personally would like to set it to 15 minutes with a count of like 4 files. I think something like this would just be more straight forward for the end users than all the different files types floating around and sometimes, most of the times actually for me it seems, the auto recover files just don't get picked up upon reopening and the information gets lost. Tim is not alone.