unearthed

@Landartma Also by now I've worked on ~600 projects, I sometimes use search tools (like regex) to find things in old files, but when you complete a job there's usually a lot of clutter you don't want to save, or find meaningless stuff in. Over life if we're not careful we end up living amongst our rubbish.

I select minutes in the dropdown, set it to 1 minute, and it's almost as good at TimeMachine, never lose more than a minute, but I only keep a few recent backups to avoid filling my disk. When I do a presentation / major change I make a copy of the file, purge it and zip it.

@J. Wallace Yes for farms, large industrial sites, mines and regional. At first I used it mainly for data processing (e.g. tiling / clipping large rasters, making complicated VW viewports ) and regional overviews, useful a regions has five farms or a cluster of towns. I had a farm last year ~5km long and design catchment was ~20Km x ~7km, I got a drone to scan the farm and fed it's 88 tiles (1.2Gb) to QGIS, it loaded in about 10 seconds and I could move around it with zero lag. In NZ we have a free govt. database with ~1800 data types on it; we have law around public-funded data being free. It's my primary initial data source (until/where I need survey data). But some of the data deeds cleaning, like lidars with all returns when you only want ground, subsampling height files, making contours from heightfiles /.dem.. Some of that I do in other tools (mainly CloudCompare) but GQIS is an essential in the pipeline. QGIS is getting a lot of CAD functionality at moment; drawing tools, revision bubbles, hatching is very good, scale bars, styling of polygons, some very snazzy auto labelling tools, and the sheet layout is perfectly usable. There's a lot of integration with scripting languages like python, perl, R... and recently an android/mac/PC mobile mapping tool which you can hook up with GNSS - a real game changer there. I'd like to hear how you get on with it; I'm self-taught so I only know what I need to know, which is not really enough, but there's good forums and books.

I avoid all and any 'cloud' (what an effing stupid term) services apart from my accounting package - patchy internet (and services get dropped) has made me very wary of all. And BIM seems to have been pushed (to the point of lobbying governments to get it required) when the software is simply not upto it. Also many companies that seem to think they are the Centre of the universe, when most designers are highly specialised and probably pick-n-mix across a suite of platforms and packages to do what they need to do - like my VW dealer telling me I could do all my GIS in VW - I mean come on, it's nonsense. Increasingly I see open source GIS as an essential (at least for the landscape consultancy workflow), it's becoming very mature, most CAD operations, I can imagine in two years doing most of my work using QGIS and just the occasional work in VW.

So do you have a jpg / rater file that is larger than the viewport? - I've found that VW generally does not clip the data area of an image file, so even though your pdf only shows what you see in the viewport the rest of the image is in the file. I have split large images out into classes to avoid this problem.

How big is the file? How complex is the file e.g. 2D / 3D / millions of objects or sensible symbols? Lots of things can bog down a computer running any kind of CAD. Is all the data (e.g. dwg, other .vwx, images...) in the file yours, or are you using data you've imported? What edition of VW?

@Pat Stanford It's this level of inconsistency that makes VW so puzzling; when I first started learning VW and discovered it had things called 'classes' I was excited as I'd just been studying OO programming and (naively) thought that inheritability and all those good things would be part of this new world. Sadly not so with this dog - we have to do all the barking ourselves.

Why not change your original design layer scale to 1:1 - I have only ever drawn at 1:1, anything else just leads to confusion IMO. Also put your problem in Subject line.

Good one; VW involves a bit of faffing around sometimes but I do (more or less) like the worksheet. I know someone who will be interested in this.

I suppose you have searched on the filename or parts thereof by now? What were you doing at time of crash? If file is important it's a good idea not to use the drive until you've searched it. IDK what your system is (win / mac / other) but sometimes files end up in odd places (especially with crashes.). I have also seen file names get truncated, which makes finding them ...not fun. Searching whole system for all files saved / created / deleted around the crash time is sometimes the only thing that works.

@Boh It would also be nice if a scale bar could be anchored to a specific location on a page. Yep, I like my bars simple too, although I always put them in the vp, then even if I forget to adjust font size (why oh why is that not automatic !!!) at least the bar is there.

Like you I work broadly in planning, science, landscape and garden design, as well as make most of my promotion graphics. I do all assembly and layout/pages in VW. I may be an outlier as I use a mix of software (mainly VW + BricsCAD, Sketchup, QGIS , VSCode and Rebelle). My main package is VW Landmark (but am still using 2012 as it does what I need) (altho' I seldom use any Landmark-specific features). I do any modelling in sketchup (and some planning ), larger scale planning, GIS and drone footage I do in QGIS (a Gb of images loads almost instantly in QGIS). Some jobs e.g. a large farm I'll do entirely in VW, it all depends on what aesthetic I think the client will best respond to. VW's (very basic) built in spreadsheet is something that no other CADs have AFAIK - with Rhino you need VisARQ which is another $500. AFAIK VW spreadsheet even now lacks drag and drop so I build all my formulas in VSCode and drop maybe 20 lines in at once - that saves hours. VW is not a very automated CAD, although newer versions sound a bit more so - there still seem to be a lot of discussions on page numbering, XREF equivalents, and irregular objects (varying wall widths, varying steps). Text linking is ... fraught. VW lacks a number of landscape/survey specific tools such as topological editing, and I'm unsure if it handles vertical curves even yet (essential when doing curbs).

@Chris Kaiser I'm one of the oddest thinkers out there - it's a feature! I'd learned using ACAD and the switch to VW was painful, even now (well I'm on v2012 but recent Q's here seems little has improved) it's not where ACAD was 15 years ago - fence select / cmd calc. Rhino still needs a few more years on the stove, form-z is well form-z. BriscsCAD is amazing but I don't want to switch now as $. BUT VW has something most / all AFAIK - a built in (basic) spreadsheet, it can make very small pdfs (with a little wrestling), and it's a good program to layup files from multiple sources (XREF equiv a bit crap not withstanding). Something else VW has is a fantastic forum, - I always want a good forum with a new program, else I walk away. I'm traditional in some ways, a lot of pencil before drawing, often using sketchup for quick models, tend only to use vw in 2D mode as my landscapes are unique from each other; a lot of in-file similarity, but little project crossover .YMMV. I'm a tiny company but do some big projects with this thing, many km across, half a million plants, a lot of pages. But I use a lot of other software to build landscapes, horses for courses really. Start simple and ask lots of Q's here.

I find I have more 'luck' with odd formats using https://www.7-zip.org/ Have you got the hard-drive with it's unrecovered files still on it? Also are you mac or windows? What version of VW? How old are the files? I don't have answers, but questions are a good way to start

@jeff prince Hi Jeff, Yes, and no really, I was just learning vw so was only designing in 2d (even now I do almost all 3d in Sketchup). The building had been pre-designed with little ability to change architecture, so landscape had to fit the engineering (somethings never change!). I have a vw of this but it's just tidy 2D I had a hunch I could make something work mainly by putting a fall on every step, and using curves to stretch the length out a bit - a lot of pencil and calculator (I had just moved from Acad and it was very frustrating not to have a cmd line calc). Have done similar things since entirely in sketchup, the right tool for rapid development. From what I've seen on here I'd say vw would have problems doing this even now. BIM seems to be arse-backwards really, just adding too much complication, without the ability to handle complexity. Landscape is too organic for most CAD IMO - and I really like CAD. The scheme also had a kind of 'flyover' coupled with an underground egress - it took a while to invent a way to do that. Complex was to be ten floors - but was probably NZ's first casualty of the 2006-2008 financial crisis. Even as a recent graduate is was patently obvious it would not have been financially viable. But it was a great learning experience, as all jobs should be. tawhai_subset_forum20210302growplanLtd.pdf