ray210•2mo ago

Auto-save in drafting software is more trouble than it's worth

Honestly, it breaks my focus and wrecks projects. Tbh, manual saves keep me sane.

3 comments

3 Comments

Working on a big floor plan in AutoCAD last year, the auto-save kicked in right as I was deleting old layers... I used to swear by auto-save for safety, but that mess changed my mind. It saved a broken file and I lost hours of work trying to fix it. Now I manually save before any major change... it keeps me focused on what I'm actually doing. The software trying to help just ends up interrupting my flow.

paul_sanchez1mo ago

AutoCAD's auto-save file is actually separate from your main drawing file, @drewperez. It shouldn't overwrite your good work unless you manually recovered from the wrong backup. The program usually creates a .sv$ file you can rename if things go wrong. Maybe the real issue was the recovery process itself, not the auto-save feature. Turning it off completely seems risky for losing everything from a crash.

patricia3852mo ago

Wait it actually saved the messed up file as the auto-save version? That's brutal.