It is clear from the numerous reports of damaged SketchUp files when saved on networked drives, cloud, or some varieties of external drive that there is some tiny window of time during a SketchUp save in which some sort of interaction with the destination or network causes SketchUp to generate a damaged file. I can’t recall ever hearing of such a damaged file when saved on an internal drive unless the destination is synced to the network.
But, so far as I know, nobody has been able to zero in on when the window occurs or what sort of event triggers the damage. That means that you can’t be completely certain whether your network and remote drive are configured in a way that can lead to the conflict. You might get lucky and not have the problem for years, and then make some seemingly unimportant change to the network and start encountering it. It could even be something you didn’t explicitly change, such as additional traffic on the network.
The point is that with so much uncertainty about exactly what is going on, you are playing with fire if you ignore the advice to save locally and transfer to the network later.
Well this has become much more active than I expected.
Thank you for the feedback everyone. I think we can all agree that having software issues is one of the most infuriating experiences we can have, especially when we are on deadline or simple in a good workflow.
Anyway,
I guess it must be something with my network cable because if I save it to my desktop, it is not crashing this morning. When I go to save to the network drive it is having the same problem.
Damaged ethernet cable? Easy enough to replace. If not that, bad ethernet port in the wall? NIC card in computer needs to be reseated? Try one thing at a time until the problem goes away so you know which thing it was. This sort of troubleshooting is coming from someone with more than 20 years of troublshooting on critical life support equipment.
Glad to hear that the internet cable helped, but you may want to consider changing you SOP, regardless. As has been pointed out here several times, saving or loading from a non-local drive (cloud, network, USB even) can have issues in that any interruption in data transmission can cause irreparable damage to the data file. Saving to a local folder that is regularly auto-backed up to a network folder can get around the issue if you must have the file on the network, or are scared of losing it from your local drive.
Just for an update. It has gone back to crashing every time.
It worked right for half a day and now its nothing but problems… but of course I am extremely busy and don’t have time to deal with this so I and just working through the .tmp files that occur during a crash and I’m hardly losing any information.
How about trying to save and work on your file locally? That is, saved to your hard drive instead of saved out on the network. Does SketchUp still crash then?
So what’s wrong with the path to your usual save to location. Bad network cable again? Clearly SketchUp can save the file if it saves successfully to your local drive.
As has already been mentioned it is not recommended to be saving and working on files saved in a network location. You should always save locally and sync to the network location.
There seems to be something awry with your network. If not a cable then something else. Is the server in the middle of a scheduled backup when you save? How big is your file? Have you tried pinging the server, does it show errors? Well kept company LANs ought to be reliable enough to save to, that’s why they generally exist.
Another possibility: are you running an extension that might be interfering?