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Make sure that you don’t lose anything
Computers are usually very stable these days, at least as compared to years ago. There are a couple of settings in AutoCAD that can make sure that you don’t lose days of work if something major does happen. Pull down the “Tools” menu and pick Options. In the Options dialog box, pick the Open and Save tab. Under File Safety Precautions, make sure that Automatic save is checked. This feature is designed to save information about your active documents as you work so that if the software crashes or the computer turns off unexpectedly, you can restore the drawing files that were open. Set the Minutes between saves to the desired minute interval.

In the case that the software crashes or the computer turns off unexpectedly, the Drawing Recovery dialog box appears the next time you start AutoCAD, telling you that information was collected from the drawing files that were open at the time the program unexpectedly failed.

The Drawing Recovery Manager automatically opens, displaying a list of all drawing files that were open when the failure occurred. Expand the folder associated with each drawing to preview and open each drawing or backup file in order to choose which one should be saved as the primary DWG file. The drawing, backup, and recover files are listed in the order when they were last saved. The automatic save file has the SV$ extension. Note that unsaved drawings are not tracked by the Drawing Recovery Manager. So, make sure to save your work after you begin, and regularly thereafter. If you close the Drawing Recovery Manager before resolving all affected drawings, you can open the Drawing Recovery Manager at any time by pulling down the “File” menu and picking Drawing Utilities – Drawing Recovery Manager or by entering ‘DRAWINGRECOVERY’ in the Command prompt.

You can specify the autosave file location by pulling down the “Tools” menu and picking Options. In the Options dialog box, pick the Files tab. Expand Automatic Save File Location and pick the default location. Click the Remove button.

Then, click the Browse button and browse to the new desired location.

If you have multiple hard drives or are on a network, I would suggest storing the backups to a different computer. If something happens to the computer that you are working on, you ensure that you do not lose any vital data. The performance of the computer is not affected.


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