One of my drawings got into 0 KB!!! Can't open it

[Hugo]

Last night I left my computer on while I went out, thinking I was going to work later, but when I came back I decided not to.

I pressed command + q and Vectorworks (10.0.1) asked me to save all of the open documents (4). I said yes to each one , VW quit and then I shut down my iMac.

Today when I try to open one the 4 files, I get a message telling me this:

"This is an unrecognized file. It may be a VectorWorks file created by a newer vesrion of the application, it may be a very old MiniCAD file, it may have been created by another application, or it may have been corrupted by a hardware or system error."

I went to the file and it's size is 0 KB!!!! Yesterday it was about 5 MB of size. How can this happen??? All my work of days was there. I haven't done nothing special.

The file appears modified at 4:50 am, the same time as the other three files I saved when quitting VW. So the error must have happened then. But everything seem to be good.

Is there any chance I can recover that file? I didn't backup yesterday, and it was a lot of work. This is a serious bug!!!

I'm runing VW Architect 10.0.1 under Mac OS X 10.2.3 in a 400 mhz iMac DV, 768 mb of ram.

Please help me!

[CipesDesign]

Hugo, Before you totally freak out (which you might need to do later), make a thorough search of your drive(s) for another same or similarly named document. Every now and then I have noticed that VW's gets confused. Usually after restarting the computer and looking at which item are where (ie: on the desktop or in their folders where thry're supposed to be) I have found same name flies. This couldn't happen in OS 9 but seems to every once in a while on OS X. Good luck. Let us know... Peter

[Hugo]

CipesDesign

Thanks for your input, but I already made a search on my HD and nothing appear. I even restarted, run Disk First Aid and repaired permissions, but my file remains in 0 kb.

At least I have some previous backups and now I put VW to automatically backup in a separate folder (instead of autobackup over the same file). But makes me worry about what may happen in the future.

Thanks anyway!

[Guest]

Hugo,

When you left the computer and came back later on, was the computer in sleep or was the hard drive on energy saver?

(Energy saver in the control panel)

What do you have the Energy Saver set to?

[Hugo]

Katie:

I have Energy Saver to never sleep, but I have selected to put the HD to sleep whenever posible.

Anyway, I already rebuild my drawing over an older backup, but I'm afraid this may happen again.

[Guest]

Energy Save is what allows the HD to "sleep" while not in use after a specified period of time.

There are known issues with Mac's not awaking from sleep and have been for some time.

We reccomend leaving this setting off.

I think what happened was the hard drive didn't fully awake when you quit the program, not allowing the file to save properly.

Also, I should note you shouldn't quit the program without closing the files first. It's a good rule of thumb to use Quit in emergency situations only.

Likewise on Windows machines -- you shouldn't click the X in the upper right hand corner to close out a file or application unless it's necessary. Using File>CLose and File>Quit can help in avoiding this problem.