backup

[Landartma]

I have consistent issues with backup.  Even on small docs.  I was just working on a small planting the program crashed when I filled a landscape area with ground covers.  I restarted and changes for the last 3 hours were gone.  The backup did not happen.  I searched the hard drive to see if it went somewhere else and it did not.  I did the original save, back up is set for every 10 minutes.  This happens frequently and I have to keep redoing work.  Where am I going wrong here...I'm loosing my shirt.

[Boh]

Check the backup location hasn't changed. It may have done if VW reverted to it's default preferences (has been happening to me recently.

 

I suggest you store backups on a local drive but not on your desktop. These are my settings:

 

[Landartma]

That could be it.  For some reason it did move to one drive.  which would make sense one drives connectivity is suspect much of time.  Fingers crossed.  Thanks!

[unearthed]

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.

 

[Landartma]

Here is a stupid question.  I have two pretty large hard drives I save to.  Why would I need to purge.  Does it actually affect the function of VW.

[Boh]

24 minutes ago, unearthed said:

I select minutes in the dropdown, set it to 1 minute,

I use to autosave every 5mins but had problems on larger files as the actual autosave operation could happen when I was doing something else high usage and would often crash the program. I took someone's advice on this forum and switched to saving by number of operations instead and the crashing issue doesn't happen nearly as often as it used to.

[Boh]

23 minutes ago, Landartma said:

Here is a stupid question.  I have two pretty large hard drives I save to.  Why would I need to purge.  Does it actually affect the function of VW

As well as reduce file size I often purge to clean up the file and make it more manageable. I don't know if it makes much difference to the actual running of the program but at least it will open quicker - depending on how much stuff you can purge.

[Landartma]

Ah ha the file remains connected to the backup file?

[Landartma]

That makes sense.  I read on a few other forums that saving by operation is the way to go.  I go to layout a bunch of ground cover and it crashes.  Now I have a clue(s) as to why.  Thanks @Boh

[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.

[Landartma]

Thanks for that advise I will certainly learn how to clean my room. 

[niagara designer]

Thanks for the advice on the backups - same issues here, where the backups end up in weird places, and the backup occurs when in the middle of a big-deal operation, lol.

or else I get a message asking if I want to delete the entire file...yikes...

I will send backups to my hard drive now, rather than dropbox.

 

another question - when you "purge" what kinds of things do you get rid of?

what are the big culprits for hogging memory?

 

and also ***any thoughts on what causes things to bog down when using VW, and how to keep things lean and mean while using it?

been meaning to ask this for awhile!

 

thanks, from Lisa

[Landartma]

Hi Lisa,

Completely off the subject.  Are you working in the Niagara area?  I grew up there.  I changed my back up settings to 20 operations and it seems to run better.  To the VW powers that be its a great topic for a training.  Keep VW race ready.

[Pat Stanford]

If you save an unlimited number of backups then you will have an unlimited number of files you have to look through to find what you are looking for.

 

The typical configuration of backups would be something like every 10 operations for one day, One per hour for a week, One per week for a month, then one per month as archive forever.

 

Or what I do is only worry about backups of the actual working file that I manually save. All of the Autosaved backups are only for very recent data recovery and are all purgeable. I have VW set to store all of those backups in a single location which I then purge about every 3-6 months.

[niagara designer]

Thanks Ed and Pat.

 

yes, purging the backups well after the job is done makes sense - something that I will do!

 

mine is set to save the last 3 backups, auto-saved every 5 minutes.

so I guess that is not causing too much of a slow-down...

 

On purging the file itself (or cleaning my room!) - what are the memory/RAM hogs that slow things down?

I am reading that rendered perspective views, and bitmaps, are 2 culprits.

 

what about imported jpegs (like aerial mapping of conservation authority shading for ex.)?

or pdf of survey when dwg not available?

those are things I generally wouldn't want to purge though.

 

extrusions?

numerous DL's?

 

Ed - Landartma;  NF, NY? I live in Vineland Ont. but have a best she-buddy in NF NY.

 

oh, and I see my info says VW 2019 which was correct back then. should read 2021.

 

thanks again!

[Landartma]

@niagara designer I grew up on the niagara river in western ny.  You know the difference between the sides.  It makes sense that your working in Ontario wind country.  Not much going on on the US side especially in NF.   landartma Littleton Ma.  Not enough work in Niagara USA when I started... I think its getting a bit better but as you likely know the area has been depressed for 50 years.

I'm not sure about the jpegs or pdfs.  My guess is that the more flotsam you can purge out of your system the better.  I just seem to have resolved this issue myself.  It looks like save to local disc and then back up by operation are the big keys.  It seems as if on one of my templates which I created from a job I did when I first started is where I have many of my slowdowns.  I'm thinking its still somehow connected to the original file.  It behaves like something big is running in the background.  I'll create a new one then see how it goes.

[Pat Stanford]

One more thing about backups/autosave is that you probably want to save to your local SSD drive, not to a network volume. The speed difference between and SSD and a network (or even a local spinning hard drive) will be incredible. If you are saving every 5 minutes (or more often) save locally. Then just remember to save to the network before lunch and at the end of the day and you should do pretty well.

[niagara designer]

thanks Ed and Pat.

I'll do the backups to the hard drive - sounds like that will help.

 

[niagara designer]

Ed - yes definitely see the difference between NF NY & ON.

I'd say more in wine country, but wind turbines are nearby!

🙂