Vectorworks 2024 drifts away overnight

[VIRTUALENVIRONS]

Has anyone else seen this.  It happens quite often.  I usually shut down VW's when not using it, but sometimes forget.   In the morning, 50% of the time, the application still shows open, but there is nothing there.  If I use force quit (Mac) it shows as "not responding".  

 

Force quit, reopen, all is good.

[Pat Stanford]

I am not seeing that. I often (always) just let me Mac sleep at night and don't remember ever coming back to VW being frozen.  I have lots of other things that freeze VW (Maybe once or twice a week, usually when I am scripting and doing things that I shouldn't be), but not overnight.

[The Hamma]

I have had vectorworks crash when leaving it for a while unattended. But I’m on a Windows PC.

[VIRTUALENVIRONS]

21 minutes ago, Pat Stanford said:

I have lots of other things that freeze

It is not that it freezes, it is just not there except in the mind of the laptop.  The icon (Mac) show that it is open in the "Dock", but the screen is clear.  Computer works fine, but I don't have anything for VW's.  Do a force quit and it shows as being open, but not responding.

 

Hard to figure, I will do a screen capture next time.

Edited July 14 by VIRTUALENVIRONS

[VIRTUALENVIRONS]

Here is a screen video of the Drift Away effect.  Notice VW shows open, but I can't get any menu items and then on Mac it shows not responding;

 

 

[Pat Stanford]

I don't know about why VW is not responding, but that narrow gray band around the window looks like the 'Exposé' function of Mission Control. Or possibly a new function of Desktop.

 

Check out the Desktop & Dock pane of System Settings. These is an option to "Click wallpaper to reveal desktop" with options for Always or Stage Manager Only. This zooms out every window of every app to allow you to see the desktop.  I use this as a kind of shortcut to Finder when I need to open a new Finder window as well as for access to files on my desktop.

 

This can also be achieved via a keyboard shortcut of F11. (or function F11 if you have the keyboard set to use the default functions like screen briteness and volume)

 

HTH

 

 

[VIRTUALENVIRONS]

17 hours ago, Pat Stanford said:

but that narrow gray band around the window looks like the 'Exposé' function of Mission Control

I happens somewhat irregularly, but I think it has to do with "hot corners and a second monitor.  This is just a gut feeling, but as you are aware, there are some issues with Mac OS, second monitors and VW's.  Sometimes I hit "hot corner" instead of sleep.  With my config, this can only happen on the second monitor.

 

I am going to just do Sleep for a while and see what happens.

[cberg]

Does VW disappear or gray out? Sometimes the application grays out and appears when a pop up dialogue box is open somewhere, possibly off screen. It might appear that VW is not responding.  
 

if you are working on multiple monitors what happens when you unplug and gather all the windows to the primary computer display?  Can you quit (as opposed to force quit) using command + w?

 

if you haven’t already done so, you may want to turn off the confirm before auto save setting off. I vaguely remember having those sorts of issues a long time ago when I had that setting turned on. 

 

 

[VIRTUALENVIRONS]

@cberg  Thank you for the tech suggestions.

 

As it is more of a curiosity than an issue, I have not paid much attention to it.  It has happened as long as I have had 2024 and M3 MacBook Pro.  It only happens when VW's is idle over night, which means it does not affect anything, so again a curiosity.

 

The main key that I am following is "Vectorworks Not Responding" when I activate Force Quit.  So somehow at idle, VW's found a way to have a "memory handling" issue.  It may possibly related to Service Select and that I am not a Service Select member.  If you are connected to VW's through Service Select there is always background activity the user is not aware of.  As I am not, this may be causing the problem.

[LvLd]

This happens when connected to external monitors and I leave it open for an extended period of time without input.

Eventually the Mac goes to sleep, then the monitors goes to sleep. My pop up for saving backups comes up every 15 minutes as it should so it's probably on the external.

When I wake the computer and monitors up, the pop up to save a back up is no where to be found and I can't click anything or do anything in Vectorworks until a choice has been made on the pop up. Yet it is no where to be found.

 

The fix is right click on the Vectorworks icon in the dock and click "Show all windows" 

Pop up reveals itself, I make a choice, it goes away and then all is right in the world. 

[VIRTUALENVIRONS]

@LvLd Thanks for that.  I will remember that next time it happens. 

[Pat Stanford]

An alternative would be to set the Autosave to either happen automatically, or to set it to the number of operations instead of time.

 

My normal recommendation is to do both.  I have my autosave set to every 30 operations, I save to a separate backup file in a single location for all files, and keep 20 backup copies.

 

By saving by operations, you know that the autosave will not kick in in the middle of a VW functions running.

Saving to a separate backup file means you can revert back to your unsaved version if something bad happens.

Saving to a central location means that when you need to get to a backup you know where they are and they don't clutter your working directories.

Keeping 20 backups is a compromise between being able to recover everything and using a a reasonable amount of disk space.

 

In addition, when I am in peak season on a project I will typically duplicate the file every morning before I start so I always have a way to revert to the status at the end of the previous day.

 

In addition, I keep everything on DropBox so there is both a local and a cloud copy. And I run a nightly cloud backup that gets stored on the Amazon cloud.

 

With all of this I have still managed to lose data.

 

There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who have lost data and those who will. 😉

 

$0.02

 

[E|FA]

33 minutes ago, Pat Stanford said:

Keeping 20 backups is a compromise between being able to recover everything and using a a reasonable amount of disk space.

I have a similar workflow with autosave every 30 actions and 30 Maximum Number of Undos so I can always go back one way or the other.  I use an external "junk" 2TB SSD and keep a 1000 copies. I can go and delete old files manually if I ever need more space.

[zoomer]

48 minutes ago, E|FA said:

and 30 Maximum Number of Undos

 

I keep only 3 Backups for legibility/control.

For any unforeseen happenings I use just Time Machine.

 

But do not forget to check Time Machine - from time to time (pun intended) - especially

after migrating to new macOSs. At one point I had Time Machine running supposedly

flawlessly for more than a year but could not access any file from the Time Line when

I finally needed to ......

Edited July 24 by zoomer

[Pat Stanford]

For a long time I have used the quote "Nothing is backed up until there are three copies on at least two different kinds of media in two different physical locations."

 

I think I am going to edit it slightly. "Nothing is backed up until there are three RECOVERABLE copies on at least two different kinds of media in two different physical

locations."

[VIRTUALENVIRONS]

On 7/24/2024 at 2:49 PM, Pat Stanford said:

I think I am going to edit it slightly. "Nothing is backed up until there are three RECOVERABLE copies on at least two different kinds of media in two different physical

locations."

I would always do the same when I was working.  My main computer and two external hard drives.  The current work on DVD.

 

I am going to migrate this back to "Drifts Away".  I have been testing something.  Up until I posted this question, I had been using a "Sleep Corner".  I forget why as I have always used "Sleep".  I have left VW's on over night a number of times and it has not "Drifted Away".