Had a blueprint file corrupt right before a deadline last Friday

I was two hours from submitting a full commercial set and the file just started throwing errors - tried the autosave backup and it was corrupted too. Did I spend too much time trying to fix the old file instead of just redrawing the affected sheets from scratch?

2 comments

2 Comments

sethanderson12d ago

Something that nobody's really talking about is whether your file got corrupted because of the way you saved it or the program's own internal glitch. I had a buddy who was working in Revit and his file would randomly corrupt, turned out he was saving over network drives instead of locally and the connection would drop mid-save. Could be worth checking if your autosave folder is set to a local drive before you blame the software entirely. Also, a lot of people don't realize that some backup formats like .bak or .ac$ can also get corrupted if the original file was already half-baked when it autosaved. Might be worth running a file integrity check on your whole project folder just to see if other stuff is hiding trouble.

williams.amy12d ago

@sethanderson makes a fair point about network drives and such, but honestly? Two hours from a deadline is cutting it way too close for anything that fancy. Like, yeah, it sucks that the file corrupted, but most of the time that's just bad luck with the software or a power blip. I've had files get garbled from a simple USB unplug at the wrong moment, so it's probably not some deep conspiracy about your saving habits. The real question is whether you spent too long trying to rescue a dead file instead of just redrawing the critical sheets, which is a lesson in not getting too attached to a single file. Autosaves are nice but they're not magic wands, ya know?