Hi all
Where do the autosaved files get saved?
I am running QCAD 3 on Linux. I made sure to turn on autosave, and set it to save every 2 minutes. My machine just crashed, and when I restarted QCAD and re-opened my drawing, it was a version from about 1 hour ago.
How can I get back the autosaved version?
Thanks
In the temporary directory configured on your machine. This is most likely /tmp under Linux. If the environment variable $TMPDIR is set, it overrides this default.
QCAD 3 RC2 will allow you to configure the auto save path for QCAD individually.
As the temporary directory on Windows machines gets wiped on startup, the default setting isn’t useful. I’ve had system crashes lose work because of this. Would a real directory be a more useful default for autosaves? Mine’s now set to a proper non-temp directory.
@ Brass Monkey: Thanks for the hint. I’ll change the default to another directory for Windows systems.
Task:
No problem, happy to help. @others - this is easy to change by hand:
Edit > Application preferences > Load/Save > Auto Save, and change to a non-temporary directory.
Watch this directory carefully as you may find it filling up after a bit, and prune carefully if it starts to bloat.
Thanks for the tip!
I am having the same problem on my professional version (3.7.7) running on Windows 7. Any idea where the backups are saved, or what setting I need to change?
I also was asked “would you like to open the backup” but the backup was from about half an hour ago even though autosave was running every couple of minutes.
Any advise appreciated.
Please understand that auto save does not create backups of your drawings.
Autosave automatically saves your drawing from time to time to make sure changes are not lost in case of a QCAD or OS crash, power failure or similar. If you wish to revert to an earlier version of your drawing, you have to rely on your own backup mechanisms which are (hopefully) in place.
I’d recommend the following backup procedures as an absolute minimum whenever doing anything serious with a computer using any type of software:
Hi Andrew 
Thanks for your response to my query and for clarifying how autosave works, I didn’t really know the details.
I think I have misused the terminology, but what I was really trying to say is that yes, I just want to be able to get my work that is lost when QCAD crashes (which it does on my machine occasionally). I usually hit save every few minutes while working but sometimes I forget. When I reopened QCAD after the crash today it gave me a prompt which I paraphrased as “would you like to open the backup” but it may have been “last saved” or whatever the QCAD wording is.
Unfortunately the regular autosaves didn’t seem to work on this occasion, this has happened before where the autosave seems to be happening every couple of minutes but after the crash I have still lost about 10 to 30 minutes work. Do you know what may be causing this?
[Regarding actual backups, I do manual backups daily & weekly but thank you for the info on the auto hourly backups, that sounds efficient and easy, cheers].
Sorry for re-opening such an old thread, but this just happened to me.
I can not seem to check / change the autosave location in QCAD 3.28.2. Where is the default location now, and how can it be modified?
Thanks!
Hi,
For what I know … A temporary copy of the current state is stored in the original document folder.
A prefix ‘~’ or tilde is added in front of the filename.
The ‘changed’ status is displayed by an asterisk in front of the drawing name on the GUI tab.
That may already be changing the current active layer. 
The temporary copy is removed on saving the original drawing.
But not on ‘Revert’ + ‘Close’
Without any changes or further changes, no Autosave file is preserved.
When one exists on opening an original drawing, one can choose for the original or the copy.
I see that the copy is renamed to suffix ‘bak’ in that case.
The temporary copy, the ‘bak’ file are nothing more than files in the textual DXF format.
For a large DWG file they can be huge.
Regards,
CVH