I could use some support, I just lost 6 hours work

■■■■ man, I do not know what to say right now.
I’ve just encountered a humugous bug and lost 6 hours work.

I’ve had this before… I save periodically, every 20mins or so. And have done…

Then, after some operation, not even anything intense, I think i was just copying a rectangle and putting it somewhere else, the program crashed. I thought nothing of it, I figured, maybe by 2gb Win7, DualCore Intel (8+yr old laptop) just ran out of RAM or something.

But the infuriating thing is, the file which I saved numerous times throughout the day shows no sign at all of having been saved (judging by the save modified date in windows explorer).

This is beyond belief arrgravating, as the work I was doing was challenging enough as it is.
This is the 2nd time Sketchup has done this to me.

Sketchup pro 2016 . I feel like binning this software.

Is there anywhere Sketchup saves a backup please?
This is desperate.

regards.

EDIT: Sketchup also lost its brain over the UI/tool layout, is this relevant?

EDIT 2: Last time this happened was in 2017, thread here, but it’s been closed:
https://forums.sketchup.com/t/sketchup-crashed-i-saved-progress-but-4-hours-work-lost-help/41922/10

PS Ive got auto-backup enabled.

I usually find that my autosave files are in one of the following locations

  • The same folder that the SU file you are working in is in (with the prefix AutoSave_FileName.skp)
  • C:\Users\UserName\Documents
  • C:\Users\Sam Morris\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent
  • C:\Users\Sam Morris\Recent

You can do a search in windows file explorer for ‘autosave’ and it should bring up all the entries.

Searching those locales was one of the first things I tried. Although, I never thought to try Microsoft\Windows\Recent.

That folder was the only glimmer of hope . - I did find a file with the relevant filename with a promising MODIFIED date.

But, it was only a 1kb shortcut to the working file (which I save on my D drive).

This bug is murderous and I do believe it to be a bug so far. As I said, I had this before around April of 2017. Same situation, crashed for unknown reason. (This time around I believe I was doing something very simple like creating a rectangle).

It is very very very strange. The file in question (at D:\Sketchupping) shows as if I haven’t even opened the file since 2017. When the truth is, I’ve been working on it today (22nd). I have auto-pay kip enabled, and auto-save set to every 5minutes. I did not check the working folder before the error dialog box and subsequent error quitting of SketchUp so I cannot say for certain whether it was making an AutoSave file (as it should do), but it certainly isn’t there in the aftermath.

I cannot rule it out, but I will say I believe my hard disk is in physically ok condition.

I had this problem in 2017, though the thread is closed, I can’t remember what the technical feedback was.

I really don’t know if this is a bug in SketchUp, or whether it’s my windows in some way. For what it’s worth, this is a very recent (within 1mo) reinstall of windows 7.

The machine is old, I can say that. 2gb ram only, but the model was very simple. I had an imported JPG (8megapixel photo) ~4mb of a floorplan I’d taken a photo of. I was in the process of outline-tracing, and had nothing more complex than about 100 lines, no curves, all straight lines.

The headache of this whole affair is: of course that I’ve lost it. But b) because I’ve not been able to get access to the original digital plans from the architect. --so I had to resort to photographing a plan from above, A1 paper laid out on table. Resulting photo has some perspective imbalance where I was unable to get in the optimum overhead position with the camera.

So ideally I’d have just traced the outlines but I’ve had to draw measures lines instead. After this failure I don’t think I’m going down this same road again, I’m gonna try and get the original plans digitally.

The crash is still perplexing though.

Huh? What does that mean?

A strategy that works for me is:

  1. never do auto save.
  2. always use “save as” and then include version numbers in the filename.

This way I can roll back if I do something real stupid and / or sketchup crashes.

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I did end up doing that with an old project that I had going (last year)… It’s good practice. I guess I hoped the worst was behind me… Alas…

This is a strange strange bug.

if this type of issue is limited to your system - which apperars to be so - it’s very likely that is related to your system surrounding too.

Adhere to the good practice of not saving over and over again but creating a sort of document versioning by doing a “Save as…” with an increasing version number (e.g. “xyz.01.skp”…) as already elaborated above… at least for all important documents regardless of the used application.

And buy you a decent system for avoiding hardware bottlenecks (RAM, CPU/GPU) as well as a poor OpenGL implementation of the used graphics card driver… if upgrading the system, do not go for anything else than a (dedicated) GeForce GTX GPU.

Yes, I’ll be upgrading soon. Currently looking into it.

I haven’t been back much to SU since the crash, a bit cheesed off. But, can anyone tell me, i know the crash has long since passed, but will there be any useful crash logs anywhere at this point?

I’d at least like to submit something to Trimble.

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