opening a backup after a crash

[Phil hunt]

i have set my files to keep the last 4 backups of a file

however when i have had a crash and have to use one of the backup files

i loose some of the geometry created within the original file....

an example of this is a boardroom table with rounded corners of say a 300mm radius on each corner....this reverts back to the original rectangle extrusion when the shape was created....is this a normal action of the program?

(sometimes i use the fillet tool in 2d

and sometimes i use the fillet edge tool in 3d but the action that i have described does not differ)

[PVA - Admin]

Only if that was performed within the last 15 minutes/actions of when the crash occurred (or whatever time/actions you have your backups saving at), the document should be saved in the exact state it was at the time of backup, geometry should not change.

I have seen things like that occur when a document becomes corrupted and has to recover, but when that happens, there is an error message stating something to the effect of "This document is corrupted, Vectorworks will attempt to recover as much as possible" and then it will create a file with a flag on the end of the name.

Was that table fillet something you had done much earlier during drawing or right around the time of the crash?

Also keep in mind that if you have it keeping 4 backups every 15 minutes, the oldest backup would be from an hour or so before the crash. (I am assuming you knew this but just checking to make sure it wasn't a much older version than the most recently updated backup.)

[Phil hunt]

hi Jim Just on a point of the backups what do you think is the best preference

I set it as the 4 most recent backup files with 30 actions before it saves to the backup however when I am working on a project that I have had frequent crashes I save after every other action......am I setting my backup preferences correctly?

On the other point I dont receive any error messages........ when this happens it doesn't happen on every file......I sometimes convert the geometry to 3d polys to alleviate the above problem......... Thanks

[PVA - Admin]

Thats a heavy backup but nothing wrong with it. Saving every other action is only risky if you start to outrun the backups, so if you rapidly fired off 6 actions before it could finish saving it might choke. But then it should just lag, not cause loss.