Confused by AutoSave in AutoCAD?

Have you ever crashed AutoCAD before? If not then you are very lucky user or may have never used AutoCAD R13. So what does this have anything to do with AutoCAD R13? AutoCAD R13 introduced a feature called Automatic save or Autosave. Which by far for many others and me out there I am sure, it became a way of life after Hatching and Dimensioning in AutoCAD. It has bailed some of us out of some tight spots at times, but there is one large pitfall to this functionality. Have you ever noticed at times that your Autosave file might not have the most recent changes in it over the last hour, but your Autosave is set to happen every 5 or 10 minutes?

Well, Why is this might you ask? This behavior is the pitfall in the Autosave feature. The Autosave time is reset after each Save, Qsave or SaveAs that the user might perform. So if you have a habit of saving every couple of operations your computer may not have many Autosave files on it. In this case your best bet is to try and go after the back up file, which should be located in the same folder as the drawing that you are working on.

You can actually tell in AutoCAD when the next Autosave is going to take place by using the TIME command at the Command Line. Each drawing has it's own Autosave time interval and this is assigned upon the first modification done to the drawing. So if you have ten drawings open each is counting down individually from the first modification. This could leave them seconds or minutes apart from each other. Below is what the Command Line looks like after running the time command before a save is done and then after a save is completed.

Current time:             Monday, August 30, 2004 at 4:40:46:845 PM
Times for this drawing:
  Created:                  Monday, August 30, 2004 at 4:28:05:380 PM
  Last updated:           Monday, August 30, 2004 at 4:40:45:123 PM
  Total editing time:     0 days 00:12:41.515
  Elapsed timer (on):     0 days 00:12:41.465
  Next automatic save in: 0 days 00:05:10.504

Current time:             Monday, August 30, 2004 at 4:40:46:845 PM
Times for this drawing:
  Created:                  Monday, August 30, 2004 at 4:28:05:380 PM
  Last updated:           Monday, August 30, 2004 at 4:40:45:123 PM
  Total editing time:     0 days 00:12:41.515
  Elapsed timer (on):     0 days 00:12:41.465
  Next automatic save in: {no modifications yet}

The difference is on the line "Next automatic save in:". This lets you know that no Autosave is currently in progress. Some additional information on changing the Autosave time and whether a backup file is created when doing a save can be found under a couple different topics in the Options command found in the online help. Other things that might be of interest are the system variables ISAVEBAK (Determines if a BAK file should be created or not) and SAVETIME (The interval of time in which an Autosave file should be created after). I hope the behavior is modified in a future release so that every 5 or 10 minutes, or whatever the user has chosen as the time interval it will be honored by AutoCAD. As for right now, I would recommend not reallying on the Autosave always being upto date if you need to recover it.

Sincerely,
  Lee

Comments

[DAVID McEACHERN]

I've noticed that if i have multiple drawings open at once the auto save doesn't save at all. I've had 5 drawings open at once for 30 min. and my autosave is set to 5 min. I accidently closed a drawing before saving. When I went to my autosave folder the drawing wasn't there. Is there a way to set autosave to save for each drawing, when they're all open? I am working in AutoCAD 2006.

[Lee]

Autosave is a confusing feature to many. Autosave actually doesn’t do a save until the drawing has focus in AutoCAD, so you could actually have a drawing open with changes made to it and have it never create an Autosave. Other things to know about Autosaves is that if you do a manual save the timer resets and doesn’t start until a change is made to the drawing, so if you open a drawing the autosave might not start right away. So if you do a save no autosave file will be created, until the new timer has reached 0 which might not happen if you have a good habit of saving your drawings. Currently, the behavior is as designed.