Drawing Recovery Manager

I mentioned the Drawing Recovery Manager in a recent post, but only in passing. Today seemed like a good time to come back to it, because I needed it yesterday!

I was in Orlando to help out at an event by Imaginit, where Lynn Allen gave her popular "60 AutoCAD Tips in 60 Minutes" presentation. Although the agenda was pretty full, we managed to find 20 minutes that I could use to give a super-short demo of the new features in AutoCAD 2010.

I was halfway through my first topic, freeform modeling, when AutoCAD crashed. :-( Actually, what happened is that the program froze -- I had to use Task Manager to kill it and restart AutoCAD. (In my several weeks of beta testing, this is the first time this has happened, honest!)

But it turned into a great opportunity to show off the Drawing Recovery Manager. As soon as AutoCAD restarted, the DRM was right there with all the files I had open at the time of the crash. No searching, no worries, and I was right back up and running. Whew!

The Drawing Recovery Manager will show you the following file types (if available), listed from newest to oldest:

• DrawingFileName_recover.dwg
• DrawingFileName_a_b_nnnn.sv$
• DrawingFileName.dwg
• DrawingFileName.bak

You can choose to open any of these and re-save them to continute working. When you have your file back, you can right-click on the drawing in the list and select Remove.

One catch: if you haven't saved your drawing at all, it won't be included in the Drawing Recovery Manager. You have to have saved it at least once to recover it.

Even though you have this great safety net, there's still no excuse for not saving your drawings. So save early, save often, and remember the Drawing Recovery Manager!