Saving your work in a digital world (especially relevant for BIM CAD or users of other heavy memory reliant applications)..

In your working career, either while studying or in the workplace, it is inevitable that at some point you will lose work that you are currently working on. In our industry (heavily dependent on the computer), it will happen to everyone. Hopefully only once!

The sad fact is that most people need to experience this before they truly understand the importance of backing up. Only when you have lost, days, weeks, or years of work (this has happened to me when my hard drive died on my laptop, some years ago) will you truly understand the importance of backing up.

In my case it wasn’t a massive problem, as this happened to me at a time when I still kept paper files of all my work. These days, we could work months on a project before needing a paper copy.

Why am I telling you this?

In all the years I have taught Archicad in face to face classes I find that most students do not hear, or recall the conversations on saving work.

In our online environment where I have little control over what notes you read, and absorb, this conversation is even more important.

It is one of those things where until it happens to you, you just don’t imagine it ever will.

Having said that, everyone will lose work at some point, whether it is at the start of a project when you haven’t done much work or when you are just about ready to submit. The latter is most likely because the archicad model seems to become less stable the bigger the file is, and if your computer does not have the memory to cope, it will often crash.

So how can we avoid having a major fail?

1. .save..save. Save your work regularly. Don’t rely on the autosave. The autosave is great if your computer crashes, as you will then be able to retrieve your work to your last backup. But only to the last autosave, you may still loose a lot of work.
2. The rule I use is to always think that the computer could crash at any time, so, if I have just completed some work, which I would hate to lose, I will do a File> Save. This will ensure that my work as well as my last backup is current.
3. If you are playing around with the program and experimenting it is best to do this on a separate file. In this case do a File> Save As> Name. This will ensure that if you change settings, and muck up your drawing, it won’t be a problem. Making changes to your settings is one of the greatest problems in archicad, as it can affect how you view your model. Depending on the settings you change it may also be difficult to return to previous settings, without a good working knowledge of archicad.

What else can I do to avoid losing work?

4. Do a backup of your work everyday. This should include any work you do for your studies, including reports, pdf’s etc. It is a good idea to save your work to a cloud based backup, an external hard drive, or a usb at the end of every work session, or every few days, depending on how much work you are doing. This will ensure that if you have a major hard drive breakdown that you don’t lose all your work.
5. Don’t work off your usb or hard drive. If you are retrieving work from your external drive (usb or hard drive) always save it to the ‘c’ drive on the computer, do not work directly off the usb or hard drive. This is because when you are working in archicad the program is constantly accessing the .pln file, it does not like doing this (as it must work harder, and can’t access all the memory) and prefers to work from the ‘c’ drive.

BTW- I have seen students ‘fry’ their usb working this way. Resulting in them losing not only their archicad work but all work on the usb. A usb should only be used for ease of carrying work between computers, or short term solution to a backup drive.

6. Don’t save your archicad file on your desktop. I have seen students desktop littered with files, photos etc. Do not keep anything on the desktop except shortcut icons. Working with archicad on the desk top does not allow the program to access the computer’s memory efficiently. Although you may not notice a problem when using other applications is becomes evident in archicad as the program uses vast amounts of memory to work properly.

If you follow this advice you should be able to minimise loss of work on your computer.