Backup files

[LevisL]

So I got hit by an unexpected power failure late this afternoon, just as I was finishing up a set of con docs... right in the middle of printing them. Once the power came back on, I turned my computer on and re-opened the file. At first glance, everything looked okay, minus a couple changes I had made right before the power went out. About 10-15 minutes into it, I realized a couple cad details are missing, including one with all the schedules I had worked on today, some of which were quite long and detailed since it's a commercial building. By that time, autosave had already written over the last autosave from before the outage a couple times (mine are set to 5 minutes). I usually do manual saves often-ish, but with the deadline I had today, I guess I didn't save the plan file all afternoon, just the layout file... is there any other autosaves or backups in a system folder somewhere that I could look for, other than in my Chief Data folder? Or am I SOL and better just fix myself a stiff drink and get back to re-drawing everything I lost?!     

[Renerabbitt]

7 minutes ago, LevisL said:

So I got hit by an unexpected power failure late this afternoon, just as I was finishing up a set of con docs... right in the middle of printing them. Once the power came back on, I turned my computer on and re-opened the file. At first glance, everything looked okay, minus a couple changes I had made right before the power went out. About 10-15 minutes into it, I realized a couple cad details are missing, including one with all the schedules I had worked on today, some of which were quite long and detailed since it's a commercial building. By that time, autosave had already written over the last autosave from before the outage a couple times (mine are set to 5 minutes). I usually do manual saves often-ish, but with the deadline I had today, I guess I didn't save the plan file all afternoon, just the layout file... is there any other autosaves or backups in a system folder somewhere that I could look for, other than in my Chief Data folder? Or am I SOL and better just fix myself a stiff drink and get back to re-drawing everything I lost?!     

is your documents folder synced to onedrive?

[LevisL]

Nope. My manual saves are saved in Dropbox, but autosaves are just in my documents on my mac. I looked in Dropbox for the version history, but no luck. 

[Chopsaw]

Not that it will help you out this time but I have had printing issues before that ended up crashing the program.  Since I had a few serious losses doing that I got into the habit of always doing a manual save before printing.  Convenient that those tools sit side by side.

 

There has to be a significant amount of data in the undo file but don't believe there is any way to recover it.  Sorry.

[rgardner]

If you are on a mac by chance do you have time machine setup?  go back to before the power outage and grab one of the autobackups and copy the detail over???

[LevisL]

39 minutes ago, rgardner said:

If you are on a mac by chance do you have time machine setup?  go back to before the power outage and grab one of the autobackups and copy the detail over???

Unfortunately, I don’t have it set up, nor do my I have iCloud backups set up to backup my documents folder. I used to have Time Machine set up, but my backup drive failed a while back and I never replaced it. With all my drawings usually saved to Dropbox, other than autosaves, it wasn’t urgent. 

 

Anyway, I managed to recover at least the pdf version of the schedules with Dropbox version history, so barring any changes, I can at least just re-import them back into my plan or layout file, just not editable. I’m close to the end of this project, so fingers crossed! 

 

I guess the lesson here is that I need to backup the backups! I’ll look into into replacing that external drive or backing up the autosaves to either Dropbox or iCloud.

[rgardner]

2 minutes ago, LevisL said:

Unfortunately, I don’t have it set up, nor do my I have iCloud backups set up to backup my documents folder. I used to have Time Machine set up, but my backup drive failed a while back and I never replaced it. With all my drawings usually saved to Dropbox, other than autosaves, it wasn’t urgent. 

 

Anyway, I managed to recover at least the pdf version of the schedules with Dropbox version history, so barring any changes, I can at least just re-import them back into my plan or layout file, just not editable. I’m close to the end of this project, so fingers crossed! 

 

I guess the lesson here is that I need to backup the backups! I’ll look into into replacing that external drive or backing up the autosaves to either Dropbox or iCloud.

I am in the same boat.  My Drobo NAS drive died a few months back and although I have everything on icloud I don't have a regular time machine backup setup currently.  I need to remedy that for that one time...  BTW a good UPS for a desktop computer is pretty essential as it also protects against voltage spikes and brownouts as well as the occasional power outage that was not expected.

[Renerabbitt]

1 hour ago, LevisL said:

Anyway, I managed to recover at least the pdf version of the schedules with Dropbox version history, so barring any changes, I can at least just re-import them back into my plan or layout file, just not editable. I’m close to the end of this project, so fingers crossed! 

Question from me is, what’s difficult about making a schedule? Usually a few minutes time. Any reason not to redo it?

[LevisL]

21 minutes ago, Renerabbitt said:

Question from me is, what’s difficult about making a schedule? Usually a few minutes time. Any reason not to redo it?

Here’s why! The room finish schedule is not the type Chief does automatically. And there was a ton of customization in the door schedules using the door OIP’s and custom fields. The only one that was quick was the window schedule!

[LevisL]

2 hours ago, rgardner said:

BTW a good UPS for a desktop computer is pretty essential as it also protects against voltage spikes and brownouts as well as the occasional power outage that was not expected.

Very true. I’ll look into getting one of those as well.

[Renerabbitt]

47 minutes ago, LevisL said:

Here’s why! The room finish schedule is not the type Chief does automatically. And there was a ton of customization in the door schedules using the door OIP’s and custom fields. The only one that was quick was the window schedule!

Meant to be a helpful response.
The door schedule you could setup quite easily by creating style pallets that carry Macros in OIP/Custom Fields with them, then it would just be point and click on your doors.
The room schedule could be automated but would be limited in terms of graphics. as they pertain to column/row padding, but the time saving would make that pretty desirable to me. How are you producing that schedule?
 

[LevisL]

2 hours ago, Renerabbitt said:

Meant to be a helpful response.
The door schedule you could setup quite easily by creating style pallets that carry Macros in OIP/Custom Fields with them, then it would just be point and click on your doors.
The room schedule could be automated but would be limited in terms of graphics. as they pertain to column/row padding, but the time saving would make that pretty desirable to me. How are you producing that schedule?
 

 

Good idea about the style palettes. I'll definitely give that more thought.

 

For the room finish schedule, it's basically just lines, text boxes and filled CAD circles for the dots. All manual. I had one from a previous project, though much smaller, saved in my library, so it was just a matter of changing room names, adding extra rows and copying/pasting the dots as needed. I made it as fast as I could by using transform/replicate and multiple copy wherever I was able to. Each square is 12"x12" in plan, so it made it easier that way.

[Renerabbitt]

21 minutes ago, LevisL said:

For the room finish schedule, it's basically just lines, text boxes and filled CAD circles for the dots.

You could instead simply copy an ASCII bullet and place it in a Custom Field that reports to the schedule. You could drive it from any symbol such as a 1"x1"x1" cabinet on a hidden layer that uses style pallets and reports to the schedule and again just point and click. Further that by making the custom field input a macro so you can dynamically change the symbol as needed and also link the style pallet tool to a library object on your toolbars so that you have an icon.

[Electromen]

This won't help with the lost files, but will prevent it in the future.

Buy an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS). A UPS is a 120 volt battery backup. 

I like APC

This one, APC Back UPS 1500, Compact Tower, 1500VA, 120V, AVR, LCD, 10 NEMA outlets (5 surge)

will do everything you need to continue printing, save and safely shut down the computer until the power comes back on.

Depending on the load such as computers, printers, monitors, etc., you should be able to continue working for 30 minutes or more, maybe an hour.

It's also an excellent surge arrestor.

I have one on my office computer, one on the home computer and a small run for internet and network.

After a few years, the battery will need replaced like any battery, but it's easy to do.

[ericepv]

On 2/22/2022 at 11:14 PM, Renerabbitt said:

is your documents folder synced to onedrive?

In addition to my external BU drive, I also manually save my project files to OneDrive. I didn't know that there is an auto sync option, how does that work?

[Renerabbitt]

Just now, ericepv said:

In addition to my external BU drive, I also manually save my project files to OneDrive. I didn't know that there is an auto sync option, how does that work?

Documents folder is the default location for Chiefs data folder and subsequently the archive folder. By default, I believe Win 10 has the documents folder in onedrive, so by default the archive should be synced to the cloud which then has versioning based on a given filename.
I never lose a document, I have an iterative folder structure in dropbox and archives in onedrive. Pretty bulletproof

[ericepv]

28 minutes ago, Renerabbitt said:

Documents folder is the default location for Chiefs data folder and subsequently the archive folder. By default, I believe Win 10 has the documents folder in onedrive, so by default the archive should be synced to the cloud which then has versioning based on a given filename.
I never lose a document, I have an iterative folder structure in dropbox and archives in onedrive. Pretty bulletproof

Although it seems to be a seamless solution, Chief does not recommend setting the documents path to OneDrive. I've been told by tech support that there is a chance (although probably a small one) that data could be corrupted if there is power spike or something similar while the data transfer is taking place. This would be  great option to add in future versions.

[Renerabbitt]

31 minutes ago, ericepv said:

Although it seems to be a seamless solution, Chief does not recommend setting the documents path to OneDrive. I've been told by tech support that there is a chance (although probably a small one) that data could be corrupted if there is power spike or something similar while the data transfer is taking place. This would be  great option to add in future versions.

been using it for a decade with no issue. This is old news. Onedrive and Dropbox have far advanced the coding of their software since that suggestion from Chief. Files are saved to explorer and then parsed to the cloud. Power spikes will make no difference.

[DRAWZILLA]

30 minutes ago, Renerabbitt said:

been using it for a decade with no issue. This is old news. Onedrive and Dropbox have far advanced the coding of their software since that suggestion from Chief. Files are saved to explorer and then parsed to the cloud. Power spikes will make no difference.

except when the internet is out, you can't get to your files, I like to keep files on my computer at all times

[Renerabbitt]

3 minutes ago, DRAWZILLA said:

except when the internet is out, you can't get to your files, I like to keep files on my computer at all times

My files are on my computer, I only selective sync inactive files. So this is not an issue. Maybe I will produce a video explaining all of this. There is literally nothing but upside to using cloud based project orginization, no cons to speak of.
When I save a project, it lives on my computer regardless of my internet connection(I should know, I work in Costa Rica twice a year)
My files are actively synced to the web when I do have connection.

[DRAWZILLA]

Thanks Rene, I just had a bad experience using one drive where it took all my files and put them on the cloud without asking me first. There must be a setting. I do use Carbonite as a backup only, but I never work anywhere else than my desktop.

[LevisL]

12 hours ago, Electromen said:

This won't help with the lost files, but will prevent it in the future.

Buy an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS). A UPS is a 120 volt battery backup. 

I like APC

This one, APC Back UPS 1500, Compact Tower, 1500VA, 120V, AVR, LCD, 10 NEMA outlets (5 surge)

will do everything you need to continue printing, save and safely shut down the computer until the power comes back on.

Depending on the load such as computers, printers, monitors, etc., you should be able to continue working for 30 minutes or more, maybe an hour.

It's also an excellent surge arrestor.

I have one on my office computer, one on the home computer and a small run for internet and network.

After a few years, the battery will need replaced like any battery, but it's easy to do.

 

I ordered this one from Amazon yesterday:

https://www.cyberpowersystems.com/product/ups/intelligent-lcd/cp1000avrlcd/

 

Seems to have just as good reviews and it was just a bit better priced than a similar APC unit. Hopefully it works well!

 

I'll have my iMac, plotter and small printer hooked up to it, so I should get close to 10 minutes of runtime if the power goes out when I'm using one of the printers and the CPU is running at its max, and 25 minutes or longer if I'm not printing and CPU usage is at 50% or less . Realistically though, in most cases, I just need enough time to save and shut down if the power goes out! 

 

I also turned on Dropbox Backup to backup my desktop and documents folders to Dropbox, so hopefully by doing both of these, I won't have another incident like this!

[Electromen]

Good moves on both counts.