Section drawing disappeared!

[Anonymous]

I had a builing section that I unlinked to turn into a drawing. I then extensively edited the drawing, adding quite a bit of detail.

I believe I continued to save the drawing frequently as I worked on it (I also have Autosave set to save every 5 steps), but when I went to save the section as a Plotmaker drawing, Archicad crashed. There was some message that quickly appeared about not being able to save section before it crashed. When I opened it again, the section was no longer a drawing, but was back to a linked model and none of my extensive changes were there! Is there any hope of getting this drawing back? What happened?

One extra detail, I had the section set to "simple section marker" and the sheetnumber setting set to "Plotmaker", which I never tried before.

Thanks for any help.

Using Mac OS 10.3.2 (panther) on G4/500 with Archicad 8.1.0 v1

Stephen

[Anonymous]

Stephen,

You say you saved frequently. Did you also have the backup copy option turned on? If so, the work should be in the BPN file. This will only help you if you have not continued to work and save since the crash.

Otherwise I think you are out of luck and must take some consolation in the fact that it usually only takes one third to one fifth as long to redo work as it did to create it in the first place (in my experience anyway).

We often use team work even for solo projects. Besides other advantages it saves the last five versions of the work which is much more security than the BPN offers.

As far as the cause of the problem, or finding the work anywhere beside the BPN, I am at a loss. I have seen ArchiCAD lose track of newly created model views in a crash but never drawing views and certainly never after a save.

[Anonymous]

I did not have "Make a backup copy" checked. Live and learn. I only had "permanent integrity checking" selected. I've never had this happen before. It's very strange. It totaly wiped out my section drawing as though I never unlinked it from the model. The section marker is still there, but it's linked to the model with none of my 2-d changes - which were significant.

I saved ithe section partway through as a pdf, but I don't know what I can do with that other than use as reference. Any other thoughts?

[Anonymous]

I think it's time to just sit down and redo the work. As I said earlier, at least it doesn't take as long the second time around.

Theoretically you could convert the PDF to Postscript and then try to find some way to convert that back to CAD readable format, but by the time you did all that you could have redrawn your work several times over. (Not counting the time you spend looking for and buying the software for the conversion.)

In fifteen years of using ArchiCAD I have never seen data loss like you describe. I can think of one user error that could do it. (I assume you have already excluded this possibility.) If there were two otherwise identical sections except that one is the drawing with all the work in it and the other an unaltered model view and that somehow the wrong one was deleted by mistake. I am not suggesting that this is what happened, it is just the only thing I can imagine. Maybe ArchiCAD somehow managed to simulate this situation by somehow resetting the section definition internally in the crash.

Sorry I can't be of any more help than this.

[Aussie John]

You are lucky Matthew, I've seen it a number of times where after a hard crash a particular secion needs to be regenerated. And i've only been using it for 12 years

[Anonymous]

John,

I've seen it often in freshly minted model views (i.e. unsaved prior to crash). But I have never seen it happen to saved drawing views.

The model view problem has never been any more than a very minor inconvenience for me since ArchiCAD just redraws the section for me, and I nearly always unlink before doing extensive editing in section.

[Erika Epstein]

John,
when you open up the section, did you try turning on all layers?
The work you did may still be there, but perhaps you did not properly save the layer combination in the view set.