Opening, saving, and closing files

In this video I'll show you a few tricks for saving, backing up and recovering damaged files. Let's go ahead and open a few files to get started here. Go up to the Open icon on the Quick Access Toolbar. And, navigate to the Chapter 02 folder. Let's open Plumbing Mechanical and the Architectural Imperial Units Drawing file. So, to select them I am going to hold down the Ctrl key and select those three items. Click Open, and they will appear here on different file tabs.

You can take a look. Let's say I made a change to one of these files. For example, here I could erase. I'll click the Erase icon here. And I'll erase this chair. I'll click on it and press Enter. Now I'd like to save the drawing. I could click on this icon, that would save it with the same name that it has now, or I could click on this one, to give it a new name. I'll choose Save As, and I'll call it 2, on the end of the file name, like that. Save. Now if I make another change, say I pan the drawing by holding down the mouse wheel and dragging, you'll see that an, a little asterisk appears after the file name to indicate the file has changed.

You can now Save it. I could either click this icon up here to do that, or type Q+Save or the keyboard short Q+S. Also you can press Ctrl+S, so there's many different ways to do this. My favorite is just to type Q+S, and press the spacebar with my thumb. That seems to be the fastest for me. AutoCAD will also automatically save the file after a few minutes. And you can control how long that is in the Options. So let's go to the Application menu, click on Options, and take a look at that. Under Open and Save, right down here you can choose to automatically save a copy of your drawing every 10 minutes, or however many minutes you want.

I find this to be a little bit disruptive. because I can be working and, and then all of a sudden AutoCAD will pause for a second while it's saving a large file. I find this to be a little bit annoying so I usually turn this off. But alternatively you could increase the save interval to something like every half an hour, and maybe it wouldn't get in your way as much. You can also optionally create a backup copy of every file. And I have that on. So let me show you what happens when I Save this. I'm going to press Ctrl+S to Save. And I'll go over to the Windows Explorer, take a look at the file system here, and see what's happened on disk.

So, I have a new file, ArchitecturalImperialUnits2 that was created when I used Save As. And then the backup file was generated when I just typed Q+S. If you need to use this file, let's say this one gets corrupted or deleted, you just have to rename the file extension to DWG. And it will open as a regular drawing. This can be handy, because you're doubly protected. But, it takes up twice as much space on disk. So, for that reason, I tend not to use this method. So, if you don't want to automatically create a backup, you can go back to Options.

And you can do that quickly by typing O+P+Enter. And we'll just turn off the Backup File Creation and the Auto Save feature. Of course, then you're running the risk of losing everything. But we still have yet another form of backup available to us through Autodesk 360. That's only available if you sign in up here to the service. And then every time you save a copy will be uploaded to the cloud. In some cases you might need to recover a damaged drawing. There's a special command for that called Recover.

I'm going to type that in, Recover+Enter. And I will select this Damaged Drawing File. Open. It's taking a while to think about this and to analyze all of the objects in the drawing. And now it's found two errors. Who knows what they were, but thankfully they were fixed, so I can say close. If you experience some strange behavior in the program where, a line, you know it exists, but it doesn't show up, for example, you can try recovering the file, and it might correct any error.

Now, this is rare. This only happens in big project files that take a lot of memory. So, I just want to point this out, so you have another technique to save your data. In the next video, you'll learn how to set the drawing units.