Massive Problem with Autosave - lost days of work!!!!!!!!!!!

[Anonymous]

I'm not sure what happened, but on Friday and today I worked on a project, and just a half hour ago my computer said it's hard drive was full and archicad closed. I opened it up and I can't explain why the drive was full because after a reboot it showed 8 gigs free. Restarting archicad however threw up another error saying there wasn't enough space to run archicad on the current drive ( 8gigs free) and shut down. Well that cleaned the autosave folder and now I'm in DEEP S**T!!!!

This has happened to me before in different way with archicad and I think it would be very prudent if archicad wasn't so willing to delete or overwrite the previous autosaves. Maybe something like a rolling log but how it is now, this can't stay this way.

If anyone has any suggestions at all what I might do, please help, I'm serioulsy in deep trouble right now.

[Anonymous]

And I had no choice now but to reopen a three day old version of this job. I'm sure that killed any chance at recovery but please if anyone can think of anything PLEASE PLEASE let me know!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Barry Kelly]

If you have had the job open since Friday and have not manually saved it yourself then you really have no-one to blame but yourself.

Don't rely on auto-save.
Save every couple of hours or when you have done something important that you don't want to re-do.
And if it is just a design process that you are not sure that you want to keep then save-as with a new name and save-as with the real name when you are happy with the design.

If your disc was reporting that it was full then maybe that is why Archicad could not save the auto-save files.
I have no real idea why this would be the case that your disc was full but maybe it has to do that you have left your machine running for a long time without shutting your applications off.

Barry.

[Anonymous]

Barry wrote:
you really have no-one to blame but yourself.

Don't rely on auto-save.

I know.

And I won't. Seems at my age I would have learned by now never rely on anything.

[Laszlo Nagy]

I think it is a very good and useful habit to get into to just press CTRL+S periodically, no matter what program you use, be it Word, Excel or ARCHICAD.
Computers, operating systems, applications are capricious. They make mistakes just as the people who created them do.
It is never to late to get yourself into a good working pattern.

[Anonymous]

If you only have 8 Gb of free space on your drive you are going to get many issues, the operating system and programs you use require space for writing cache files, working files etc let alone trying to manage the drive and bad sectors etc.
I would be worried if a drive was ever more than 80% full.
How is your backup? You should be able to recover from you backups. If you are not backing up you should, this is your livelihood and ideally have two copies one stored off site.
Scott

[Laszlo Nagy]

Scott has a point.
Let us just consider the case of Virtual memory. Maybe it is set by the system by default to, lets say, 16384-32768 MB, which is 16-32 GB. Initially it may occupy the lower limit of this range, 16 GB from the space available on your hard drive.
Then, let's say, ARCHICAD and other programs require a lot of RAM, so it increases the size of the 16 GB of Virtual RAM to more by occupying more of your drive free space. This way your 8 GB of RAM can run out very easily and fast. Then you suddenly have no space on your hard drive.

So it is advisable to have ample amount of space on your drives, the 80% Scott mentions is probably a good point to start looking at ways to free up space.

[Anonymous]

I was really hoping someone would say, "did you check this obscure folder cause archicad does that."

Yes, I agree, it's entirely my fault. I have paid for it in spades.

Regardless, when I restarted Archicad the first time after the reboot, the autosave came up with the project and I selected it, then Archicad threw up the error that it couldn't run in the 8 gigs free (it was the only thing running after a fresh reboot) and then promptly shut down again. That's when it decided to clear the autosave. Had it not cleared the autosave and instead rolled the previous autosave in a rolling save for say, like the last 20 autosaves, then the autosave would have been much more useful to me.