I've Been Losing Changes...


HumbleChief
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I always do "save as"

 

sometimes as often as every 5 min.

or after I finish a task I don't care to repeat

 

by doing "save as" I can add date/time to the file name

gives a nice archive system

 

check your preferences settings to see why you are not

getting a "save changes" prompt

 

or call CA's tech support

 

Lew

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I thought that in addition to 'reminding of a change' that CA always creates a *_auto_save_bak.plan file in the archive folder every time the file is closed. Looking through my archive files, it seems like the time stamp on the *_auto_save_bak.plan file is always very close in time to the time stamp of the 'final save' of the file. 

 

If you forget to 'save', the archive backup file might be a quick recovery approach - although I think CA should also warn you on the next opening of the file that a new one exists... 

 

[ramble off]

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Chief usually does warn user that a newer version exists in the archives than the currently saved version that you are opening. This happens when Chief is closed w/out saving or crashed. The auto-save file gets overwrote at whatever time interval you have spec'd in Preferences/Auto Save  & permanent auto-archived copies of the plan are stored at the spec'd interval in Preferences/Auto Archive Files. 

Chief's auto archive system is so reliable, I have stopped making back-up copies on my own a long time ago. It has never let me down. You have a serious problem somewhere if Chief allowed you to close the program w/out a dbx to "save". Get w/ TS.

post-120-0-58612200-1408453156_thumb.jpg

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Not sure about the scenario of closing and asking to save. I always treat that as a saftey net and kick myself if It ever hits. We have had bugs in older versions of Chief where this wasn't working under very specific and difficult to reproduce scenarios. I'm not aware of a problem with X6 but would not rule that out. If you can figure out steps to reproduce the problem we would love to know what they are.

 

Auto save is based on a timer. By default it saves once every five minutes. So in theory you should only lose at worst the last 5 minutes of work. An auto save is not automatically done when you close the program, unless for some reason it hits exactly at that point.

 

I would recommend continuing to have an off computer and ideally off site backup system in place. Don't rely solely on the archives that Chief makes. If your hard drive fails, or your computer is stolen, or some other catestrophic event occurs like your office or house burning down, you will really want that off site backup. With today's network based backup systems it is easy to set this up.

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Thanks Doug,

 

I do have an off-site back-up set-up and cannot replicate any specific scenario and repeat the problem as you suggest. It's random and at first I thought I had changed a setting or something but it has happened more than once now so I'm just very cautious from now on. Can't say where the problem is and mainly posted to warn others to take care and to see if anyone else had experieinced the problem.

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Don't rely solely on the archives that Chief makes.

Didn't mean to imply that.

I do have an off-site daily back-up set up for all changed files for my entire PC.

I was referring to artificially/manually making copies of the plan to store elsewhere on the PC HD or other local drives.

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My back-up drive & software are provided by Seagate. It's on my LAN, but not physically attached to my PC. I know I'm supposed to get files out of the building, but I'm waiting for a housefire to happen 1st so I lose everything & learn a valuable "I told you so" lesson. Those lessons are the most effective.

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  • 4 weeks later...

We have been having this problem as well,  It hadn't affected me much but had affected other people in the office,  then today I opened a plan file that I had been working on a few days ago,  and none of the work had saved,  it showed the plan file latest saved at 1.39pm,  but in the auto archives I found a file that was 5.19pm, very odd...  so the archive file was a few hours more recent than the plan file...   I hit save constantly when I am working, and make sure I hit save before closing any window...

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I got caught the other day by not saving the plan file when I closed it thinking that saving the layout that I had just used to open it would take care of it.  I new better, just got in a hurry and forgot.  I was warned and everything.  Just a reminder to save both the plan file and the layout.

 

Part of why this caught me is that I mostly use the layout to open plan views.  One of those note to self things, don't do that.  It was also the last plan view that I had open, not good, lost about 20 min of work, no auto backups or anything that time.

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