Drawing Recovery Tool

Have you ever seen this pop up before?

Unfortunately I have. It happens, from time to time, that a DWG file you urgently need will not open.  It has become corrupted somehow.  Now, I know you all have backups of your files, so ordinarily, this should not be a problem, but… Well, what if you don’t?  What if that is the only copy of the DWG file you have.  Don’t worry, all is not lost.

Depending on the level of corruption in the drawing, you can use the inbuilt recovery tool in DraftSight Professional.

To find the tool, click on the DraftSight icon, then select Manage and then Recover.

A dialog box will appear asking you to select your corrupt file.

Just select the corrupt file and click on OpenDraftSight will then perform a recovery on the file and one of two things will happen next.  The first, and worst outcome is that DraftSight is unable to recover the drawing file.  This is where those backups come in handy.

The second outcome, and the one we are looking for, is your drawing is successfully recovered and opens in DraftSight.

If recovery does work for you, I would suggest checking your drawings for any missing data and then running the Clean command.  Check out this blog for more on the Clean command.  Once the Clean has completed, save your drawing file.  Hopefully you will be back in business with a repaired drawing file.

Now, I did mention about backups near the start of this blog.  Well, what if you don’t have a backup of your data?  What if the Recover tool didn’t work for you?  What else can you do?  Well, we wrote a block back in 2016 about Auto-save and Backup in Draftsight.  You can read it here and it goes into detail on how you can rename auto-save and backup files as DWG files and open them in DraftSight.

That’s it, hopefully you’ll never have to see the “Drawing file requires recovery” prompt, but if you do, now you know what to do!

Learn more about DraftSight 2018 here

Purchase DraftSight Professional 2018 for as low as $149 here.

 

MJ Smyth
The first time I used CAD, it was on a DOS PC with an 8088 processor, 640K of memory and a Hercules Mono Graphics Card... That, well that was a long long time ago. I switched to DraftSight the day it was released and haven't looked back!
MJ Smyth

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