Welcome to the New Year!

We'll start off with a tip that is never mentioned too much. SAVE your drawing as often as possible! There is nothing more frustrating than working diligently on a file and then have something go wrong with your computer and loose everything you were working on.

This week's tip will focus on how to recover a drawing file that was being worked on during an abrupt ending of an AutoCAD session.

AutoCAD has a built in mechanism to know when the application was terminated without a proper shut down sequence. Once the application is restarted, a Drawing Recovery Manager will appear as a palette to help you find which file needs to be checked or to open a backup file without having to rename and save it in Windows Explorer.

The following steps will begin with the Recovery Manager palette open.

The top portion of the manager shows folders, drawing files, and backup files that were recorded by AutoCAD that might need to be recovered or re-opened. Simply highlight the file in the folder you were working in and check the details for location and the last save time to be sure it is the file you were working on.
A preview image will appear at the bottom of the palette to help you visually determine if the file is the correct one.
The next step is to simply double-click on the listing to open the file or right-click to access the Drawing Properties window for more in-depth information.
One of the great features of this palette is the ability to open a file with the BAK extension directly. The classic way to open a file with the BAK extension is to rename the file in Windows Explorer with a DWG extension and then open it as a drawing file.
Just double-click on the file with a BAK extension to open or right-click to access the Drawing Properties window for more in-depth information, just as you can with regular drawing files.
A last tip is to do a little management of the listings that you find in the manager.
If you notice that the list has kept a fairly long history of files and folders, you can remove these listings by right-clicking and picking the Remove option.