This has happened to me a few times since moving to SU20 and I can’t quite figure out the behavior, although I was just able to reproduce it intentionally.
I’m working on a file, some tool or operation hangs and I have to force quit.
When I re-open SketchUp there is a file in the recovered file area of the welcome window corresponding to my crash. So far so good.
I open the recovered version of the file and it open and seems to operate fine. I immediately try to “save as” so the file will be saved somewhere. This is were it goes sideways…
I get a dialogue saying “file failed to save” and immediately after another dialogue saying “the file does not exist” if I try to save a second time SketchUp hangs and I have to force quit.
When I re-open SketchUp a second time the recovered file in question is no longer listed in the welcome window. Further digging into the file structure on the HD reveals that indeed the recovered file has disappeared from the recovered files folder in application support.
Do we only get one shot at recovering a file? I was able to reproduce this sequence of recovering a file, failing in saving a recovered file and having the recovered file disappear from the hard drive.
Curious about this I tried to recover a file that did save successful, this time I watched it happen having the recovered files folder open. When the file saves, the recovered file just vanishes. Not to my trash, where does it go? I guess that SketchUp assumes that as the recovered file was saved it can delete the recovered version as part of it’s normal behavior. But if the recovered version fails to save, SketchUp deletes the recovered file anyway. So effectively we get one chance to re-save a file and heaven help you if it fails?
Why not just leave the recovered files there, I’ll erase them when I want to? I guess the workaround is to always go into the actual folder and duplicate a version of the recovered file before trying to recover through SketchUp, just in case the save fails and SketchUp erases the original? Then at least you could try again.
This is making me miss the days of a trusty .skb or autosave file that would persist on your drive and even if it was corrupted you could try a few ways to fix it or copy-paste something useful out of it.
No. As far as I can tell this behavior has not been changed, we still get one chance to recover a file. SketchUp still insists on erasing the recovered file from the hard drive as soon as you try to save it, regardless of weather the recovered file saves successfully. This triggers an unrecoverable closed loop where you cannot save the open file because it has been erased from the hard drive and if you close Sketchup the file will not reappear as recoverable in the welcome window. It is gone.
The only works around for this is to ignore the welcome window method of recovering a file. Instead open the recovered files folder on the hard drive and make a copy of the recovered version in question as a backup. Then you can work on recovering the file with something to fall back on if it fails to save the first time.
This could be solved by having SketchUp save-as the recovered file and not erase the original, or at least change the order of operation so SketchUp checks that the recovered file saves successfully before deleting the old one.
The original problem was that after recovery, even before a successful save, the file in question is deleted. So it cannot be found as it no longer exists.
It is disappointing. We have been through several updates since the new file recovery system was introduced and it sounds like this behavior of erasing the backup before confirming a successful save of a recovered file is still with us. I have not had an un-savable loop with a recovered file for a while so I didn’t know if this was fixed or not, wish I could bump this issue to get fixed in a future update.
The safeguards against this are to save often manually or keep autosave engaged with a reasonable time period so you are not relying on the recovery system. If you must recover a file, ignore the SketchUp recovery system and navigate directly to the recovered files folder in your system, make a copy of the file you wish to recover first so you can place it back in the recovered folder if/when the original gets deleted. File paths are here…
Incidentally, navigating to the source folder is also the only way I know of clearing recovered files so they don’t persist in perpetuity on the welcome screen. Too bad this pathway is not included in the SketchUp>preferences>files page
