Can some kind and brave soul take a look at the attached file and see if it opens for them in SU 2026 and causes no problems?
It is not a big or especially complex file but a problem occurred when I was working on it that resulted in crashing my computer and forcing a restart. After that, trying to reload the drawing just crashes SU. It’s annoying because I did quite a lot of work on the file this morning and it currently looks as if all that may be lost. The attached file is the recovered one that causes the problem.
I wasn’t doing anything that unusual when it first crashed but I was working in fully rendered mode (including ambient occlusion). That does test my graphics card and I suspect may be the root cause of the crash. But could that corrupt the file?
As soon as I open that file, I get the beachball and then my computer tells me SU is unresponsive. Which is what happens if I try to load the original file.
So it sounds like it is not a corrupted file but something to do with my Mac and SU. Oh well…
Can you open a new blank SketchUp session? If so, do that, go into Settings and switch to the Classic graphics engine. Quit and restart SketchUp and try to open the file.
Well Paul, yes I do try to. But you know how it is. You are concentrating so hard on getting the model the way you want it you can sometimes work for, ooh, 20 minutes and forget to save! I guess I also get a bit too laid back thinking that I should only ever lose 5 minutes of work because that is what my auto file save is set to. But you are right. I should maybe get in the habit of saving after every keystroke!
I know this sounds crazy to a Mac user but have you tried a cold reboot of your computer? That is power off entirely and restart? If not, try that. Shut it off, go make a cuppa or something and then come back and power up again.
Is the graphics card listed in your forum profile correct?
I am on Windows and I have set the F1 key to do ctrl + s and I programmed myself to regularly hit F1, sometimes more frequently than my autosave frequency. If my brain thinks I’ve done some complex or time consuming modelling I automatically hit F1.
Oh, man, you are such a star! That did the trick. I was doubtful because my computer had to restart after the first crash. But clearly it hadn’t completely cleared out all the detritus which your cold reboot seems to have done. So I am back in business thanks to you. Have one on me!
I might try doing the same. Currently I have to use Cmd-S every time and I do find using modifier keys a bit tiresome. I sometimes think my skills on the keyboard should mean I have no problem playing Liszt on the piano but sadly that doesn’t seem to work.
A restart is not the same as a cold reboot. A restart skips some steps at the beginning of the boot process. Usually a cold reboot is a better option. I remember some old physiological monitors tied to mass spectrometers that I worked on in the hospital, though. If you did a cold reboot on them it was anyone’s guess if they’d power up again. We left them powered on 24x7 and even worked on the CRTs hot.
Also I use Google Backup and Sync for my current work projects (and also two other backup locations).
The great thing about Google Drive (and no doubt some other services) is that every time I hit that F1, Drive creates a version of that file – I have had upwards of 100 versions of file I could choose from!)
If I’ve lost some work or done a lot of editing that I decided wasn’t worth it, I can download the version that was just before the lost work/crash or editing.
Regarding the read only status, I have found that when I have to force quit SketchUp to break an endless beachball, it leaves behind a “headless/zombie” SketchUp process that is still spinning but has no GUI. This zombie evidently still has the file open, causing the read only situation if you relaunch SketchUp and try to open the file. One fix, as you tried, is to reboot (which kills all processes, including that zombie). Another is to open the Activity Monitor, select the errant process and kill it manually. For me, that is quicker than a restart.
I have reported this issue to the developers, and they were not able to reproduce it. They blamed macOS not SketchUp, but that strikes me as dodging the issue as this does not happen for any other app on my Mac. It’s not clear whether the difference is due to them using newer Macs with Apple Silicon or what, but for me it is 100% repeatable.
