In an event of a system crash or power outage, we mainly worry about how to retrieve a drawing in the state it was at the time of termination of program. However there are certain operations in DraftSight using which we can recover our drawing in such cases.
- Automatic save operation
- Backup files
Automatic save operation:
An auto-save option is used to save a drawing automatically after specific intervals. It is an option provided by DraftSight to store your drawing on which you are working. So that, if something unexpected happens you will have the copy of drawing. You can set option related to autosave from Tools menu >Options>System Options> Auto-save and Backup.
You can also use to system variable SETSVTM to set the time for autosave operation.
Generally autosave files are located in ‘temp’ folder of your system.i.e. C:\\Users\\username\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\DraftSight_autosave. However to quick access autosave files go to windows start menu and type ‘%temp%’ and go to folder ‘DraftSight_autosave’. Additionally you can change default path from DraftSight Options.
Autosave files are stored with extension ‘ds\\\$’, to open these files in DraftSight you need to rename these files with extension .dwg . These files contain all the drawing data till the last autosave ran.
Autosave files get discarded if you close DraftSight or save a file normally.
If you want to keep all your autosave files regardless off save/close,create a new folder for autosave files, give this folder write permissions, no delete permissions and assign this path as autosave path in DraftSight.
Backup files:
This is one more tool to recover drawing data. Back up files(.bak) are created every time when you save drawing. These file are saved with extension .bak in a same location and same name where a drawing is saved. Only one bak file is stored at time hence after saving drawing newly created .bak file replaces the older one.
To enable this backup files creation you need to check option ‘save bakup at each save’ from DraftSight Options. Similar to autosave file you need to rename .bak file to .dwg extension for use.
Backup files are useful only if you are saving files time to time additionally it is a copy of the drawing file prior to the last saves. And hence these files are always one version older than the currently saved drawing.
