AutoCAD DWG Recovery

Firstly Happy New Year to you from all the Team!

Secondly, I would like to address this blog post to the issue of DWG recovery in AutoCad. Files can get – fully or partially – corrupted for a number of reasons, such as interruption when saving or problems on the hard drive while writing however there are a tips which may recover your work.

1. Try opening the drawing on a different release of AutoCAD.
2. Use the RECOVER command – this repairs a drawing and then opens it, you will need to have a drawing open in order to do this.
3. Use the RECOVERALL command to repair a drawing and any xrefs attached to it and open it, again you will need to have a drawing open for this.
4. Locate the .bak and .sv$ for the related file, these are found in the TEMP folder which can be found in C:Documents and SettingsUserNameLocal SettingsTemp or alternatively you can enter %TEMP% in the windows explorer navigation bar – ensure your files and folders are not hidden. A .bak files type is a backup file created when the user saves a drawing while a .sv$ is a backup of a timed autosave. When you have located these make a copy of them and change the extension (.bak & .sv$) to .dwg and then open them in AutoCAD.
5. With a new drawing open select the command DDINSERT to insert the corrupt drawing. Note: Make sure when inserting you manually select the point of insertion and that it is not at (0,0) – you can change this afterwards.
6. If you can open the part which is corrupt try exporting it as a DXF file, then importing the DXF file into AutoCAD.
7. If the drawing was last saved in an AutoCAD 2000 or 2004 file format you can try to open it partially (File -> Open -> select file name and then down arrow by ‘Open’)  this opens the file layer by layer so you can isolate the layer on which the error is and exempt it from the drawing.

Unfortunately, sometimes files are too corrupted to be recovered which is why it is important to save revisions of your work that you can fall back on. If this article hasn’t solved your problem give Symetri (formerly Procad) a call on (061) 919000.

~ Rhea