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  • 5 weeks later...

Vectorworks > Preferences > Autosave Tab

 

If you have Autosave set for 5 minutes, set the number of backups to save to 20.

 

That's a lot.  Setting Autosave to 15 minutes and keeping 4 or 5 backups might be more reasonable.

 

To answer your question:  If Number of Backups to Save is set to 1, then you don't have more than one backup file.

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I disagree with @michaelk on this one. 😉

 

I think 12 to 20 is a very reasonable number of backups. Disk space is cheap.

 

Set Autosave to Number of Operations (I usually use 15) rather than minutes. That way you know the autosave kicks off between operations rather than in the middle of a command.

 

Use Autosave a backup copy to rather than Overwrite Original. That will give you multiple backups you can go back to.

 

Set the Custom Save location for all files to a single folder on your local hard disk. This will allow the fastest saves and if you normally work with files on a server will put your backups on a different piece of hardware and give you even more crash/corruption protection.

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45 minutes ago, Pat Stanford said:

Set Autosave to Number of Operations (I usually use 15) rather than minutes. That way you know the autosave kicks off between operations rather than in the middle of a command.

 

 

I do the same .... because it feels much more stable.

 

But shouldn't it be possible to also let a per minutes autosave just

start after a command is finished instead of in between a command

and potentially crashing ?

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My files are not nearly that large. 

 

But as I said disk space is cheap.

 

20 x 1.5 gb = 30gb.  A 32 GB flash drive is about $20. A 1 TB SSD is about $100.

 

What is the cost of redoing an hour of work because you only had 4 backups instead of 20? 😉

 

"Nothing is backed up until there are at least three copies on two different types of media in at least two different physical locations."

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10 minutes ago, michaelk said:

@Pat StanfordI agree with you on backing up per operation, not time.

 

As for backing up 12 to 20 copies.  Perhaps your files aren't 1.5GB 🙂 

@michaelk My files regularly get to the 500+ mB stage & but I agree -more than ten backups are essential to my workflow. As projects move along I prune the older backups till only one or two backups remain. What's made the pruning so easy is as per a suggestion from this forum, I now store all backups by VWX version in one place. So much easier to manage.

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When I am actually working on a VW project (not very often any more), I would usually make a dated backup of the complete project folder before starting work for the day. Then I would periodically go through and delete/prune some of the older versions, keeping copies at critical decision points.

 

Disk space (and cloud space) are cheap. 😉

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Every day I work on a project I Save As… and put the new date in the file name.  So I have a history of every stage/version of the project.  That's how I go back and put the second floor back on the East wing even though it was two months ago.

 

But 20+ active projects x 20+ days of working on it x 20 back ups x 1 GB is 8000+ GB.  On my laptop.  That have to be synced with collaborators.  

 

For me the dated progress files are more than sufficient for climbing back down the decision tree.  I really only use the backups to recover from the occasional crash.

 

 

 

 

 

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Gotta agree with @Pat Stanford

Autosave per # of operations with 20+ copies has saved my bacon many times.

 

I put my vectorworks backup folder on my desktop and clean it up on fridays typically.  Takes a minute, saves hours of frustration.

 

funny story about enterprise data management.  A firm I am consulting with has a robust backup scheme.  File storage is a fancy 5 drive raid array.  Workstations are copied ( not compressed / proprietary backup file format) to a separate NAS in case you have local stuff outside the file server.  Both of those data sources are on daily cloud backup.  Sounds safe right?  Well, we recently found out that piles of data are corrupted and created permissions issues on the server and that has worked its way into the backups.  It’s still unknown how this happened and the RAID drive mfg & software author is at a loss as to how it happened too.

 

Lesson, you can have a premium backup setup, but if the data is not validated periodically with a trusted software tool, you could be in for a nasty surprise when you can least tolerate it.

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23 hours ago, jeff prince said:

Gotta agree with @Pat Stanford

Autosave per # of operations with 20+ copies has saved my bacon many times.

 

I put my vectorworks backup folder on my desktop and clean it up on fridays typically.  Takes a minute, saves hours of frustration.

 

funny story about enterprise data management.  A firm I am consulting with has a robust backup scheme.  File storage is a fancy 5 drive raid array.  Workstations are copied ( not compressed / proprietary backup file format) to a separate NAS in case you have local stuff outside the file server.  Both of those data sources are on daily cloud backup.  Sounds safe right?  Well, we recently found out that piles of data are corrupted and created permissions issues on the server and that has worked its way into the backups.  It’s still unknown how this happened and the RAID drive mfg & software author is at a loss as to how it happened too.

 

Lesson, you can have a premium backup setup, but if the data is not validated periodically with a trusted software tool, you could be in for a nasty surprise when you can least tolerate it.

ouch

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I use 30 operations for automatic backup, and then I set the number of Undos to 30.  I had been having memory issues when I maxed out the Undos to 100.  With this system, if I need to go back past my saved Undos, I have an automatic backup available from one step before.  

 

I save 20 backups to an external dedicated drive, that I go in and clean up when needed.  In the rare instances that those files don't save me, I also have Mac Time Machine local and Backblaze cloud backups to grab the files from.

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